Rain by Cynthia Barnett

Rain by Cynthia Barnett

Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive.

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

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. It offers a glimpse of our founding forecaster, Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey's mopes and Kurt Cobain's grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume.

Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. 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. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Cynthia Barnett is a veteran journalist who has received numerous honors, including a national Sigma Delta Chi award for investigative magazine reporting and eight Green Eyeshades, which honor exceptional journalism in the Southeast. Her debut book, Mirage: Florida and the Eastern United States' Vanishing Water, was a One Region/One Book selection in thirty Florida counties and won the gold medal for best nonfiction in the Florida Book Awards. Barnett has a master's degree in environmental history and spent a year at the University of Michigan as a Knight-Wallace Fellow studying water. She resides in Gainesville, Florida, with her family.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780804137119
ISBN 10	0804137110
Title	Rain
Author	Cynthia Barnett
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2016-04-05
Number of pages	368
Prizes	Winner of Florida Book Award 2015, Short-listed for PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award 2016, Long-listed for National Book Award 2015
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.