Thursday, January 7, 2016

My Review of "Rain"

Cynthia Barnett's Rain:  A Natural and Cultural History is a real treat!  It's a book that kept me reading precisely because this was a book about something I'd never read elsewhere, something so simply as everyday life:  Rain.

Rain is a masterwork of creative nonfiction, an epic built entirely around the humble, parachute-shaped raindrop.  You read that right.  Raindrops fall from the sky fat end up, tapered end pointing toward the ground.  Never heard that one before?  Me either.  Like I said, this book is amazing precisely because of the things it continually brings to your attention in new and exciting ways.

Barnett fills her history of rain with such rarely seen, rarely mentioned observations.  Over and over, she focuses on the uncommon details of natural phenomena and historical events most of us never think twice about because we think we already know them.  According to Barnett, a lack of rain has helped bring down civilizations from Mesopotamia to the Americas.  Fourteenth-century witch hunts in Europe were fueled by the continuous rains and freak storms of the Little Ice Age.  An English amateur meteorologist came up with the cloud classification system that gave us the term "cloud nine".

Those sorts of details are the kinds that makes this book a real treasure -- the new ideas fall like a refreshing rain.

 I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

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