Rain:a Natural And Cultural History

Description

Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive.

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

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.

Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

About the Author

Cynthia Barnett is the author of four books including "The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans" (WW Norton, 2021). Her most-recent previous book, "Rain: A Natural and Cultural History" (Crown-Random House, 2015), was longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson award for literary science writing, and named a best book of 2015 by NPR's Science Friday, Kirkus Reviews, the Tampa Bay Times, the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe.The Globe has described Ms. Barnett's author persona as "part journalist, part mom, part historian, and part optimist." The Los Angeles Times writes that she "takes us back to the origins of our water in much the same way, with much the same vividness and compassion as Michael Pollan led us from our kitchens to potato fields and feed lots of modern agribusiness."Ms. Barnett is also the author of "Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis" and "Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S." She lives with her family in Gainesville, Florida, where she also teaches journalism at the University of Florida.

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