The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind by Simon Winchester is the book you turn to when the weather app’s red warnings start to feel like a new language and you want someone to quietly explain what is really happening to the wind that runs the world.
Wind, Winchester reminds us, is not just background weather but the hidden system that shapes climate, empire, energy, war, and even the stories we tell about ourselves.
At its core, The Breath of the Gods argues that to understand the twenty first century’s climate crisis and energy transition, we have to understand wind as both a physical engine and a cultural force, from ancient gods and trade winds to jet streams, tornadoes, wind turbines and the emerging puzzle of “global terrestrial stilling,” the apparent slowing and then partial recovery of winds near the ground.
The book’s big claims are not made in a vacuum but sit alongside decades of atmospheric data showing a global average near surface wind speed decline of roughly five to fifteen percent since the nineteen eighties, followed by a surprising uptick after about twenty ten, as documented in peer reviewed studies and summarized under the term “global terrestrial stilling.”
In practice, this means The Breath of the Gods is best for readers who enjoy big narrative nonfiction that mixes science, history and anecdote and who are comfortable with some technical meteorology, while it will likely frustrate people wanting either a tight policy manual or a purely academic treatment with equations on every page.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Simon Winchester’s The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind is a four hundred plus page work of narrative nonfiction due from HarperCollins and its British imprint William Collins in November twenty twenty five, with a US hardback from Harper and an export edition from Fourth Estate, all carrying around four hundred sixteen pages of text and notes.
It sits in the familiar Winchester lane of big subject micro history, alongside earlier books like Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World and A Crack in the Edge of the World, all of which also braid geology, culture and politics into slowly unfolding stories.
The genre is best described as literary popular science and environmental history, with a strong autobiographical frame that begins on the summit of Mount Washington, once marketed as “the windiest place on earth,” and keeps circling back to the author’s own encounters with gales, calms and storms.
Winchester’s credentials matter here because he is not a meteorologist by training but a journalist and historian who has spent decades turning complex systems into readable narratives, and he leans on a long list of scientists, archivists and enthusiasts ranging from Japanese wave researchers to specialists in Mediterranean winds and tornado climatology.
At the back of the book he thanks, among others, Jim Robbins, who first alerted him to the stilling debate, Cesar Azorin Molina, a key researcher on Mediterranean winds, and Zhenzhong Zeng’s group, whose work on the reversal of global stilling in two thousand nineteen reframed how wind energy developers think about long term resource risk.
The central thesis is simple enough to say but surprisingly slippery to hold on to.
Wind, Winchester argues, is “invisible, eternal, and essential” and any future we design, whether through wind farms or climate adaptation policies, has to start from the fact that wind is not just getting stronger in storms but also quietly changing in its everyday behaviour, with stiller mid latitude continents, faster oceans and an eastward drift in phenomena like United States tornado activity that shifts risk onto poorer and less well prepared communities.
2. Background
One reason The Breath of the Gods feels so timely is that the book lands into a world where climate headlines have shifted from abstract temperature curves to concrete wind driven disasters.
In the last decade alone we have seen record breaking hurricanes, stronger mid latitude storms and fire seasons that are as much about wind as about fuel, while the insurance industry has begun to price in scenarios where wind speeds and storm tracks change enough to make some regions effectively uninsurable.
At the same time, studies of wind energy potential using long reanalysis datasets like ERA5 show huge untapped offshore resources but also highlight how sensitive turbine output is to relatively small shifts in average wind speed and direction over their thirty year lifetimes.
Against that backdrop, the idea of “global terrestrial stilling” matters because it suggests that near surface winds over land, especially in the mid latitudes where many people live and many turbines stand, slowed by about zero point one four meters per second per decade between the nineteen eighties and twenty ten, causing a cumulative drop in speed of five to fifteen percent and noticeably reducing wind energy output in some regions.
Since around twenty ten, however, that trend appears to have partially reversed, with several independent analyses of station data and reanalysis products showing a recovery in average winds, probably tied not only to land surface roughness but also to multidecadal ocean atmosphere oscillations.
This mixture of fear and reprieve is the atmospheric tension Winchester walks into.
3. The Breath of the Gods Summary
The narrative frame opens on twenty eight September twenty twenty four, with Winchester climbing New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, famous for previously recording gusts over three hundred seventy kilometers per hour, and finding an almost eerie calm, with the anemometers motionless and the instruments registering “zero on the scale.”
On the descent he realizes the irony that he has come to the “windiest place on earth” to write a book about wind, only to find stillness on a day when Hurricane Helene is killing people further south, and he confesses that the underlying reason for the book is the controversial idea that average global wind speeds might be falling, that the world may be entering what some researchers call the “Great Stilling.”
From there the Prologue takes us away from that summit calm into the doldrums, those equatorial belts of near permanent windlessness where sailors were once trapped for weeks, and he uses them to illustrate how unsettling it is when wind, which people instinctively treat as a reassuring background presence, simply disappears from a landscape.
The first early chapters then rewind deep into human history, looking at how early civilizations in Sumer, Egypt, China and Mesopotamia experienced wind as an invisible but terrifying force and encoded it in some of the oldest surviving words, symbols and myths, from the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma to the Japanese kamikaze and the many wind gods that sit in classical pantheons.
Winchester spends a surprising amount of time on language, delighting in the Oxford English Dictionary’s hundreds of wind compounds and the extravagant vocabularies of Hawaiians, Arabs, Inuit and sailors, observing that Hawaiian alone may have more than six hundred words related to wind and that early peoples almost certainly named winds because they experienced them so constantly that they could not imagine them as anything other than central to life.
Later he generalises that wind “seems a universal,” touching almost everything it passes over, from seeds and birds to musical instruments and ships.
In one of the richest stretches of the book he shifts from metaphors to mechanics and patiently explains what wind is.
A key chapter, tellingly titled “Something in the Air,” walks through the most basic physics, stressing that wind only exists where there is an atmosphere and a source of differential heating to set air masses in motion, whether that is the sun warming one side of a planet, seasonal contrasts between land and sea, or the enormous unevenness introduced by mountains and ice caps.
He then builds up to larger scales, from thermal breezes along coastlines to the Hadley, Ferrel and polar cells that create trade winds and westerlies, folding in figures like Edmond Halley and George Hadley and linking their eighteenth century speculations to the beautifully visualised circulation cells we now see in modern climate models.
Along the way he detours to other worlds, briefly describing winds on Jupiter, Saturn and Titan and using those alien atmospheres to emphasize how unusual but also how physically consistent Earth’s pattern of winds really is.
The mood then shifts from abstraction back to touch and sound as Winchester traces everyday ways we encounter air in motion.
Sections on seed dispersal, for instance, describe how maple samaras and sycamore “helicopter” seeds use small differences in shape to harvest lift from even a light breeze, while a sand chapter turns to deserts and shows how grains can behave like a fluid when saltated by gusts, creating dunes that march at measurable rates across landscapes, a process that is now being measured in the field but was puzzling to nineteenth century observers.
Another chapter follows the “sounds of wind” from the eerie booming of singing sands, through wind chimes and roof whistling, to musical instruments that are entirely dependent on moving air, such as flutes and oboes, the latter singled out in the index by way of Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Shipping Forecast” and the piece “Gabriel’s Oboe.”
He briefly pauses over the biological wind scale that uses smoke drift and tree movement as proxies for speed, prefiguring his later extended excursion through the Beaufort scale and modern anemometry.
A whole architectural interlude focuses on the Liljestrand House above Honolulu, where architect Vladimir Ossipoff designed a hillside home that literally funnels trade winds through carefully shaped openings, using Venturi effects to accelerate and then slow the air so that the interior is always bathed in a gentle breeze instead of sweltering, a case study Winchester offers as proof that, while we cannot tame wind, we can “perhaps soothe” it and turn it briefly to human comfort.
From here the book moves onto what Winchester calls “working winds,” the stretches of narrative where moving air stops being just a phenomenon and becomes an engine.
He walks the reader through the long history of sailing, from square rigged ships and the trade winds that made the Atlantic triangle trade profitable, to Polynesian navigation in the Pacific and the role of the Gulf Stream and storms in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, highlighting again and again how imperial expansion depended on understanding seasonal wind patterns, however imperfectly.
There is a detailed chapter on windmills that starts with medieval grain grinding in Europe and North Africa, follows the technology across landscapes, and ends with their transformation into water pumping machines on the American plains and then into modern three bladed turbines, which he treats as a continuation of the same basic idea rather than a completely new invention.
Winchester spends many pages, too, on how we measure and classify wind, telling stories of nineteenth and twentieth century experimenters such as T R Robinson and Francis Beaufort who linked observable effects, like the behaviour of waves or the strain on sails, to numeric scales and later to instrument readings, work that allows modern agencies to issue consistent storm warnings and wind forecasts.
Those measurement stories segue naturally into modern meteorology and the power of the jet stream.
Using episodes like the napalm bombing of Tokyo, the Japanese “balloon bomb” campaign and the failure of early United States attempts to bomb Japan using high altitude winds, Winchester shows how twentieth century militaries learned, sometimes catastrophically, that the jet stream is not just an abstract ribbon on a weather map but a powerful conveyor that can make operations succeed or fail depending on whether planners understand it.
He then moves into peacetime, looking at how the jet stream and large scale circulation set up synoptic wind events and storms that wreck ships, topple trees and spread smoke from wildfires, drawing on classic British events like the Great Storm of seventeen zero three and the Great Storm of nineteen eighty seven as well as more recent Pacific and Atlantic hurricanes.
A particularly evocative thread follows the BBC Shipping Forecast, a nightly maritime bulletin that dates back in various forms to the nineteen twenties and has become a “national lullaby” in Britain, to illustrate how societies ritualise their relationship with wind and sea, mixing poetry with precise wind force numbers.
The final third of the book pulls these strands together in a more urgent key, moving through case studies of specific storms and winds.
There are chapters on cyclone Tracy, which devastated Darwin in nineteen seventy four, on Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, on Hurricanes Harvey and others that struck North America, and on the creeping eastward shift of “America’s wind,” the tornado belt, with particular attention to an EF four tornado that destroyed much of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in March twenty twenty three, killing several people and underscoring how risk is moving from relatively sparsely populated parts of the Plains to more densely inhabited and poorer communities in the Mid South.
Winchester revisits Rolling Fork a year after the storm, speaking with residents who weigh whether to leave or stay, and uses that conversation to show how ordinary people talk about “feeling” that winds have changed, growing more violent even as some days feel strangely calm, capturing the lived experience behind dry statistics.
Throughout these scenes he keeps circling back to the stilling debate, noting that while storms are getting stronger and more frequent by many measures, there are also quiet “wind droughts” and regions where average wind speeds have dropped, with possible knock on effects on everything from plant pollination to air pollution dispersion and wind farm revenues.
The book closes on a cautiously hopeful but sobering note, acknowledging recent evidence that global winds over land have picked up again since around twenty ten and that offshore wind resources in many regions may even strengthen, while still insisting that the idea of “a world without wind” is “too dreadful to contemplate” because of how deeply every ecosystem and human system is entangled with air in motion.
4. The Breath of the Gods Analysis
As an argument about the history and future of the wind, Winchester’s case is strongest when he is tracing how human societies have adapted to and exploited wind over long periods, and weakest when he leans into speculative climate conclusions without always fully disentangling measurement artefacts, internal variability and anthropogenic forcing.
On the plus side, his narrative shows just how many independent lines of evidence point to changing wind regimes, from ship logs and dune migration rates to modern weather stations, satellite data and the lived observations of farmers and sailors, and he usually anchors his claims in existing research rather than simply extrapolating from a single dramatic event.
He is careful, for instance, to mention that the term “global terrestrial stilling” does not yet appear in the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of Meteorology, a detail that subtly reminds readers that the concept is still under debate.
At the same time, he folds in up to date findings that the long term slowing seems to have reversed in the last decade or so, which aligns with the twenty nineteen Nature Climate Change paper by Zeng and colleagues and later assessments showing a recovery in land surface wind speeds.
Where the book is less precise, at least to my eye, is in how it occasionally blurs the lines between robustly measured trends and more tentative claims, especially around future projections of storminess and regional wind changes, which in the scientific literature are often conditional and scenario dependent, whereas on the page they sometimes read as more inevitable.
Because Winchester is fundamentally a storyteller, not a modeller, this trade off between narrative clarity and scientific nuance is probably inevitable.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
What stayed with me most strongly after working through The Breath of the Gods was not a single statistic but the way the book made wind feel present in every scene of daily life, from a cat flicking its ears at a breeze on Mount Washington to a Hawaiian architect coaxing trade winds through a mid century modern house.
The prose in many passages is quietly beautiful, especially when Winchester strings together long cadences of wind names from different languages, or when he observes that wind “warms and it chills, builds and creates, ruins and destroys,” compressing an entire moral spectrum into a single sentence.
I also appreciated how he connects grand topics like the Hadley cell or the jet stream to very human stakes, such as how a misjudged weather forecast contributed to the Great Storm of nineteen eighty seven in Britain, or how an eastward shifting tornado belt puts towns like Rolling Fork in the crosshairs.
On the less satisfying side, there are places where the structure feels baggy, with digressions into side stories that, while entertaining, can pull focus from the central question of how and why wind regimes are changing now.
I also found myself wishing for more systematic engagement with the latest climate model projections of wind under different emissions pathways, which are mentioned but not deeply unpacked, and for a more global balance in case studies, since Europe and North America get much more narrative time than, say, South Asia or West Africa, even though monsoon and Sahel winds are critical to global food security and already shifting under climate change.
In other words, the book is emotionally and intellectually rich, but its very abundance may occasionally exhaust readers looking for a tighter, more schematic guide.
6. Reception, criticism and influence
Early professional reception has been broadly positive, with Kirkus Reviews calling The Breath of the Gods “a splendidly written account of an unseeable force” and noting that Winchester ends up less worried about permanent global stilling than when he began the project, in part because recent studies show winds recovering.
Trade outlets like Publishers Weekly describe the book as a “beguiling meditation” on how humans are transported, delighted and destroyed by air in motion, and early retailer copy from HarperCollins, Barnes and Noble and Waterstones all stress the same blend of history, science and narrative that has made his earlier books bestsellers.
Because the book is so new, it is too early to say with confidence whether it will reshape public debates on wind energy or climate policy, but based on Winchester’s past influence on how lay readers think about topics like volcanoes and plate tectonics, I would expect The Breath of the Gods to become a go to reference for journalists, teachers and general readers looking for a single volume “story of wind,” much as Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works has for energy more broadly.
7. Comparison with similar works
If you have read Smil’s How the World Really Works or Elizabeth Rush’s Rising or Jim Robbins’s pieces on wind and birds, you will recognise the blend of systems thinking and narrative in Winchester’s approach, but The Breath of the Gods is less policy heavy than Smil and more encyclopedic than Rush, who tends to focus tightly on sea level and human communities.
Compared with classic weather and climate texts, Winchester sits closer to writers like Robert Macfarlane or Rebecca Solnit in the way he treats wind as a character in culture and literature, although he spends more time on mechanics and measurement than most nature writers and more time on myth, language and architecture than most meteorology primers.
8. Conclusion
If you are the kind of reader who hears the late night Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio and feels both soothed and curious about the forces behind those clipped phrases, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind will probably feel like a long, discursive answer to questions you have quietly carried for years.
I would recommend the book most strongly to general readers, writers, journalists, teachers and students who enjoy big narrative nonfiction and can tolerate some digression, rather than to specialists seeking a compact technical review.
Because while Winchester is careful with his sources and broadly aligned with current science, his real gift lies in making wind feel, in his own closing words, invisible, eternal and essential in a way that lingers long after you shut the book.
