Pacific: The Ocean of the Future

One of my favorite kinds of non-fiction - a vague theme allows the author to wander around and examine all sorts of different things. Surfing, climate, nuclear testing, you name it, it's in this book. Lends itself to starting and stopping, which is how I tend to read these days. Overall enjoyable and informative.

Winchester presents a collage of stories all centering on a place, the Pacific.

He doesn't stand back from a subject, like a good journalist, but leaps into the stories, actively sharing his very strong opinions and worries.

Accept that about him, know it, and then read Pacific. A lovely voyage of a book.

Winchester has outdone himself with Pacific. I enjoyed this even more than his many other works I have read, and I put that down to his clever selection of stories, and ability to weave complex situations into readable narrative.

His prologue is excellent, and I have quoted various passages which explain aspects of this book. His Authors Note on carbon dating is also excellent for a simple explanation of the radio carbon dating of fossils and how nuclear testing has put a date limit on this. And following that, his ten chapters, each telling different stories of the Pacific.

from P21, Winchesters description of the Pacific

Thanks to the dominant cultural bias of modern history, there is a topsy-turveydom inherent in any description of the (Pacific) rim. On its western side are the eastern peoples: Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, and countless more if one chooses to push the ocean's frontiers westward towards Indochina and India. On the eastern side are the national admixtures of the various migrated and now notionally Western peoples: Canadians, Americans, Central Americans, Colombians, Ecuadoreans, Peruvians, Chileans. Around the south and beyond to Oceania are the more newly settled outsiders of modern New Zealand and Australia. The aboriginal peoples - Native Americans, Aleuts, Inuit, Maori, Australian indigenes, the Canadian First Nation, and a host of others, all genetically Pacific peoples as we now know - remain dotted around or within the rim, where their recent experiences have become conjoined with those of the Polynesian islanders, the inhabitants of Melanesia and Micronesia, and so have been protected or decimated, exploited or revered (but never left alone), as the various histories of newcomers have unfolded.

So I made a list. I scoured newspapers and history books and databases and academic papers, and came up with some hundreds of more or less notable occurrences between January 1, 1950, and the time I began to write this book, in the summer of 2004...
In the end, I chose just ten singular events, some of them portentous, some more trivial, but each appearing to me to herald some kind of trend.

The Japanese, still busy repairing their country and still occupied by American forces, had some small reason for good cheer that day with the ending of their custom of declaring children to be one year old at birth, and of everyone adding one year to his or her age on January 1. This change meant that all 80 million Japanese would not become numerically older on this day: a forty year old would wait until his next actual birthday before becoming forty-one. For a brief while that morning, all Japanese were said to have suddenly felt younger.