Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers – An Acclaimed Natural Wonder

Simon Winchester offers a biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring humanity's relationship with this force of nature. As the Mediterranean shaped the classical world and the Atlantic connected Europe to the New World, the Pacific Ocean defines the contemporary era. With China's rise and growth in American West Coast cities including Seattle, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, the Pacific has become ascendant. The ocean's geological history includes tremendous earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. Its human history from a Western perspective began with Magellan's sixteenth-century circumnavigation. Winchester travels from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal, and to islands and archipelagos throughout the region. He observes political change in Manila, visits aboriginals in northern Queensland, travels the Alaska Highway, stops at the Pitcairn Islands, crosses South Korea, and visits its northern neighbor. He was jailed in Tierra del Fuego. The work examines ten pivotal moments: Cold War nuclear tests in the Pacific, the shift of global power from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the ocean's violent tectonics and the Ring of Fire, Winchester's journeys across the region, and the decline of European colonial power as new Pacific nations establish independence.