fabulous! fascinating! as enthralling as any book I've read. one of the few books i would gladly reread. ( )

A work of natural history focused on Wind. The author, with experience in videography, zoo-keeping, sailing expeditions, whale tracking, marine biology and anthropology, speaks of the invisible power of Wind. With a Dictionary of Wind and an extensive Bibliography enabling us to reach the original sources, he chapters the following connections of Wind: One - to Earth, its physics and geography; Two - to Time, its history and future; Three - to Life, its biology and sociology; Four - to Body, the physiology and perception; Five - to Mind, the psychology and philosophy of wind.

In the final chapter on "Heaven's Breath", the author reprises the work. Beginning with babies' first breath, he unwinds the way breathing enlivens each individual and in giving us power, unites us. [329] He notes that Myths are "animated theories about how things work", and are "more a product of science than religion".

"Students of comparative religion once believed that the panoply of separate spirits required by animism, gradually combined into general gods -- such as Aeolus for ALL the winds. And that further generalization and abstraction transformed these departmental deities into a monotheistic God, who became the Lord of Heaven and Earth. But this is an unnecessarily ethnocentric attitude, which gives undue prominence to our own most-recent beliefs. The evidence suggests a reverse process, a growth of animism out of a very early monotheistic concept of a supreme force or being." [328, citing James, "Worship of the Sky God" (1963)]. ( )

Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind begins with an observation about the trend in science being towards knowing more and more about less and less; Watson obviously laments this trend. Dredging many hundreds of references from newspapers, literature, mainstream academia and fringe research, he has categorised his findings into the physics, geography, history, future, biology, sociology, physiology, perception, psychology and philosophy of wind. A delightful, eye-opening exploration that doubles as a love letter to an under-examined phenomenon. ( )