Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories [Paperback]

Variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring…A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account. —Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition,New York Timesbestselling author Simon Winchester tells the breathtaking saga of the Atlantic Ocean. A gifted storyteller and consummate historian, Winchester sets the great blue sea's epic narrative against the backdrop of mankind's intellectual evolution, telling not only the story of an ocean, but the story of civilization. Fans of Winchester'sKrakatoa, The Man Who Loved China, andThe Professor and the Madmanwill love this masterful, penetrating, and resonant tale of humanity finding its way across the ocean of history.

Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Poets to potentates, seers to sailors, fishermen to foresters—all have a relationship with this great body of gray and heaving sea.

Winchester chronicles that relationship, making the Atlantic come vividly alive. More than a mere history,Atlanticis an unforgettable journey of unprecedented scope by one of the most gifted writers in the English language.

Winchester brings a knowledge as vast and deep as his subject to this history of the Atlantic Ocean. -Entertainment Weekly

A rollicking ride&. No one tells a better yarn than Winchester. -Washington Post

Lyrical, rhetorical and historical....Atlanticis written with a wry appreciation for historys eventual correction of mankinds injustices .....Informative, thoroughly engaging, often surprising and enlightening in the details it turns up.....one of Winchesters best books. -lC¹