The Breath of the Gods

"Epic . . . . Winchester brings depth to the history of the wind . . . . A splendidly written account of an unseeable force." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Beguiling . . . . [Winchester] conveys all this lore in prose that’s colorful and evocative . . . . Readers will savor this." — Publishers Weekly

“We love a historian with divergent interests. Simon Winchester’s oeuvre contains cultural histories of the Oxford English Dictionary, land ownership, the Pacific Ocean, transportation technology, cartography, precision engineering and much more. He’s a Pied Piper who draws readers in to seemingly remote topics and soon has them eagerly engaging with the material. The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind will investigate the currents of air that threaten our lives and environments, but also provide a path for clean energy.” — BookPage, "Most Anticipated"

“A book about transmitting knowledge by someone who has made his name by doing just that in the most erudite and entertaining way possible. . . . A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter. . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world.” — New York Times on Knowning What We KNow

“This genial and much admired author . . . might be appropriately dubbed the One-Man Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge of our own era. Whatever his subject, Winchester leavens deep research and the crisp factual writing of a reporter . . . with an abundance of curious anecdotes, footnotes and digressions. His prose is always clear, but it is also invigorated with pleasingly elegant diction. . . . He is a pleasure to read, or even to listen to, as devotees of his audiobooks can testify. . . . Informative and entertaining throughout.” — Michael Dirda, Washington Post, on Knowing What We Know

"Winchester has written about information systems before, as in his 1998 book The Professor and the Madman, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. In his robust new compendium, the author examines those systems in far grander scope, from mankind’s earliest attempts at language to the digital worlds we now keep in our pockets. This isn’t just a rollicking look back; Winchester asks what these systems do to our minds, for good and ill." — Los Angeles Times on Knowing What We Know