Pacific by Simon Winchester

This is a book about the history of an ocean and the countries that border it.  To encompass this vastness in one book, Winchester selects a series of key moments in the Pacific’s recent history. He starts in 1950 with a bravura chapter, The Great Thermonuclear Sea. It is not a pretty story. Places recently ravaged by bloody war faced a new outrage: the multiple detonation of atomic bombs. Far from the Berlin Wall, the cold war was rehearsed in blood-warm seas. Islands, and islanders’ bodies, became test sites for the apocalypse.
Not all of Pacific’s scenes are so dark. A chapter on the transition of surfing from Hawaii to California and the birth of the Sony Corporation in Japan are upbeat.

But the greatest power of the Pacific is elemental. It is where our weather is born, and in a chapter on  climate change, Winchester shows that the placid ocean is becoming steadily more stormy, wreaking indiscriminate havoc from the Philippines to Australia. At the same time, those waters have become witness to “a sudden and wholesale redistribution of world power”, from America to China. Far from running scared at the notion, Winchester wonders if it might not actually be a good thing if we were to allow the east its turn, rather than falling back on our old notions of racial superiority. The Pacific is our future ocean.