Sara Wheeler
Water, Water, Everywhere
Pacific: The Ocean of the Future
By Simon Winchester
William Collins 496pp £25 order from our bookshop
This gripping book should be called The Pacific and Its Rim, as it contains as much about the countries fringing the ocean’s 64 million square miles as about the big blue and its black depths. Simon Winchester is a prolific non-fiction writer whose oeuvre includes the bestselling Surgeon of Crowthorne (about the murderer who made major contributions to the OED), two other works with ‘Pacific’ in the title, and Atlantic, a book about the world’s other major ocean. This latest might be his best yet.
The Pacific is the relic of the once all-encompassing Panthalassic Ocean
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The identification of a mighty force sparkling intermittently seems to me to constitute the finest and most consistent poetic achievement of Goudie’s book.'
Candia McWilliam on @lachlangoudie's 'The Story of Scottish Art'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-that-glisters
Though 'the hotel had a reputation as the area’s best, its staff were not used to looking after world leaders, so the arrival of Cuba’s new strongman, Fidel Castro, came as something of a shock.'
@dcsandbrook on @simonhallwriter's 'Ten Days in Harlem'.
http://ow.ly/I63850Bvs10
'After all, who knows what anybody is really like, or what they really think? The biographer – same as a painter of portraits – cannot help but reproduce himself to some degree.'
From the archive: Beryl Bainbridge talks to Sebastian Shakespeare.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/sebastian-shakespeare-talks-to-beryl-bainbridge