Author: Cynthia Barnett
Narrator: Christina Traister
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Playback: 11hrs 44m
Genre: NonFiction, Science, Nature, History
Book Description: Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume.
Thoughts:
This book is hard to describe and there is no easy way to compare it. There are not that many books with the weather as their central theme. So I picked up this one with very high hopes. The main focus is obviously the rain, how it affects human civilizations, how it was represented in different cultures, and how survival is increasingly linked to it.
As a good start-off point- Cynthia mentions that so far as science has advanced- we still do not have a good grasp on rain, it cannot be 100% predicted, and contrary to many people's belief's impossible to control. Humans so far have never been able to make rain start or stop at will.
The book contains so many different aspects, yet it does not dive deeply into any. We have a collection of rain fun facts- it is interesting but the focus of the diverse topics did not click with me.
It starts with the formation of Earth, then it moves in to describe how ancient civilizations saw natural phenomena. Different ancient records and how their life and deities were viewed depending on the frequency if there were droughts and inundations. According to Barnett, several civilizations have records of deluge in the scale we have received in the West from the Bible story featuring Noah. There were discussions on different cultures but it felt so short, one or two paragraphs to describe the culture, their deities, and how they saw rain either as a blessing or punishment, etc. We could have expanded this section.
The odd thing is we focused for an overly long time on the more recent history of raincoats and products created to protect against the rain- this whole section I found to be boring. At least I didn't care enough to have so much time invested in it. I6t could have been mentioned in less detail for my liking.
We also have a section dedicated to climate change and how some people have been trying to fight against it in their own backyard. It was another interesting aspect.
This is an accessible book, not too science-heavy so it's one easy to get into and through. It just felt like it tried to cover so much and the way one topic bled to the next felt like it was jumping all over the place. It is still a nice rad. I might read other of her works, hopefully, the others are more scientific in nature, or at least make up of only ancient cultural civilizations.
This was used for challenges:
Buzzwordathon: Weather words
Nonfiction
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