I like Winchester's books, and this was certainly interesting and well-written, but the theme just didn't hang together for me. It's a book about a very large body of water, with the organizing motif chosen from a speech by Shakespeare. Seriously. I am half convinced that this was a drinking game, i.e. "I'll bet I can write a best selling novel about anything." "Okay, how about a large body of water, with the chapter structure based on a rant taken from one of Shakespeare's plays?" "Alright, you're on."
It's not bad exactly. It's just kind of an short riff on a breathtakingly broad subject - sort of like a haiku about European interwar diplomacy. I really missed the feeling that I was learning everything really worth knowing about something, as I did with, for example, Winchester's books on Krakatoa and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. There is certainly more to know, but I am confident I got the best factual account as well as a good feeling for what happened and why it mattered. Here the organizing theme really didn't contribute anything, I don't think - it was artifical and distracting, and kept reminding me just how jerry-rigged this book was, and how inadequately structured for the topic. At bottom, the Atlantic Ocean as a subject is just too big if you cover everything as Winchster purports to do. The science of it would have been a good topic, or the history of marine exploration, or commerce, or warfare. But all of it in one book, with several hundred million years of plate tectonics on either side of the part that involves people? It just didn't work for me.
I'm off to a book that'll be a far more complete treatment of the subject - Viscount Norwich has a new book out about the papacy. Actually I also downloaded a new book about the Crimean War that looks promising - I'm trying to load up the Kindle for the long trip to Greece week after next.