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Rain : a natural and cultural history

Weaving together science with the human human story of our ambition to control rain, Barnett tells the story of rain -- elemental, mysterious, precious, and destructive.

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  • "Weaving together science with the human human story of our ambition to control rain, Barnett tells the story of rain -- elemental, mysterious, precious, and destructive."@en
  • "A natural history of rain, told through a compelling, lyrical blend of science, cultural history, and human drama It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report and the cause of catastrophic floods; and the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Science journalist Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans to transform a fiery planet into a living one. It explains the science of it--the physics of a rainbow, the true shape of a raindrop--while weaving in the human history, from ancient rain gods and divining rods to modern flood walls and geoengineering. Rain is not only a journey through history but also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the story of the mackintosh raincoat and its eccentric inventor and to India where villagers extract the scent of monsoon rains and turn it into perfume. Rain is also a love story. For centuries, people have tried to summon it, the likes of Thomas Jefferson were obsessed with it, and, in these pages, Cynthia Barnett makes it almost palpable. She sees rain, from the increasingly severe storms that unleash it to the life-giving freshwater it provides, as a unifying force in our divided culture. Too much and not nearly enough, churning in hurricanes or frozen into icy snowmaggedons, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it."
  • "Cynthia Barnett's "Rain" begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science--the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains--with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world."

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  • "Electronic books"@en

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  • "Rain : a natural and cultural history"
  • "Rain : a natural and cultural history"@en
  • "Rain : A Natural and Cultural History"

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