Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

Winchester’s The Perfectionists is one of my favorite books of the year. Unfortunately, Atlantic has all of the enthusiasm and little of the charm, being a scattered collection of anecdotes about the ocean, vaguely structured around Shakespear’s seven ages of man. It’s best as a travelogue, with Winchester accounting all the wild places he’s been along the Atlantic coast, from Patagonia to the African desert to Greenland fjords, but even then, this book is hampered by tiny pictures and scattershot connections.