haiti-project

By a curious chance of history the islands at both the northern and southern ends of the eight-thousand-mile long Mid-Atlantic Ridge are possessions of the Kingdom of Norway. Jan Mayen Island, at 71 degrees N, is distinguished mainly for having a spectacular mountain, the 8,000 foot Beerenberg.  By contrast Bouvet Island, at 54 degrees S,  although volcanic also, has no peak worthy of mention and is so amply covered with ice that Captain Cook derided its original discoverer - wrongly - for merely having found a stray iceberg. No-one lives on Bouvet, though an automatic weather station there chatters its data incessantly. On Jan Mayen as many as 35 people are to be found there in summer,  half that number of hardy souls who endure the bitter northern winter.

In German only, I am afraid; but I am sure most will get the gist. 1064

I will be giving talks in the cities of Chongqing, Kunming and Chengdu on 29th - 31st March, to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the re-establishment of the British Council in Western China. Specific details of the times and places to follow. Do please come if you can - an excellent time to see Yunnan and Sichuan.

With the Winter Olympics getting under way in (currently snow-free) Vancouver, it is perhaps reasonable to include a word for the terror or delight of coming down a slope at great speed. The French verb dégringoler can be dusted off: from it the English have derived a noun that is much more commonly used in the figurative sense, to mean

a rapid descent; deterioration, decadence; change from bad to worse

So, from a 1959 issue of the magazine Encounter (which underwent its own dégringolade when it was found to be taking money from the CIA) we have "...the hero...underwent a convincing but totally unsensational degringolade, taking, not to drugs or drink, but to an increasing sluggishness." We do not know what then happened to the aforesaid hero. Encounter, however, went bust.

As we approach St. Valentine's Day, a nod to the romance industry. Our chosen word is of Italian origin, from the sixteenth century, and means very simply

a little love, a cupid

It claims common cause with amoret, which since 1651, and only in the plural, has signified

looks that inspire love;  love-glances; "love tricks, dalliances"

Neither word has anything to do with that sickly-sweet concoction Amaretto di Saronno, much of which will nevertheless probably be consumed during dinners-for-two in the middle of the month.

]]> http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/amoretto/feed/ 0 http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/cudjoe-lewis-2/ http://simonwinchester.com/2010/01/cudjoe-lewis-2/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:26:12 +0000 Simon http://simonwinchester.com/?p=471

Cudjoe Lewis was the last surviving African slave to have been forcibly transported across the Atlantic to America. He was bought in 1860 for just $50  in what was then the West African kingdom of Dahomey - now the Republic of Benin - and brought to the port of Mobile aboard the slave-ship Clotilde. He was freed at the end of the Civil War and elected to remain in Alabama. He died in 1935 in what is now the suburban Mobile neighborhood of Prichard, aged about 94.

The Man Who Loved China
February 11, 2010. Spencer Trask Lecture: 8pm, McCosh 50

Seldom can it be said that any one person ever managed to change the outside world’s perception of an entire nation, an entire people. But, beginning in 1954, Joseph Needham (1900–1995), a Cambridge biochemist, a figure dauntingly eccentric and brilliantly polymathic in equal measure, did just that.  In this talk Simon Winchester, who spent two years tracing Needham's footsteps across wartime China, when the idea was born, will tell his remarkable story.

A graduate of Oxford University, Simon Winchester began his career as a journalist in 1967 and has covered numerous stories for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, including the Ulster crisis, the creation of Bangladesh, the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos, the Watergate affair, the Jonestown massacre, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the Falklands War. He has worked as a free-lance writer for more than 20 years, contributing to Harper’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and publishing several best-selling books. He has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; the bestselling The Professor and the Madman; The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans, which tells the story of his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 war in Kosovo; and The Map That Changed the World, about 19th-century geologist William Smith. In addition he is the author of the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 and A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. His latest book - and from which this talk is drawn - is The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (May 2008).

On Tuesday evening in Manhattan - exactly one week after we first heard intimations of the dreadful news from Port au Prince - there will be a benefit for the victims at Idlewild Books, on 19th Street in Chelsea. I do hope those of you who can come, will come: we need to do everything and anything to help.

The book was delivered to the publisher on January 14. Now comes the long process of editing, designing, the choosing of illustrations and maps and the design of the jacket - all of which I will endeavor to tell you about as the weeks ago by .

Here are some Audio Postcards sent to PRI's The World

Simon Winchester's Atlantic World

Seal colony on Namibia's Skeleton Coast
April 6th, 2009

Simon Winchester's latest postcard reached us from a perilous stretch of coastline in southern Africa. Cold offshore ocean currents produce dense fog, and a harsh and steady wind drives the surf. That makes going ashore here next to impossible Over the centuries, more than a thousand ships have tried, only to end up smashed on the rocks.

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South Georgia mountains
March 12th, 2009

In March Simon Winchester sent an audio postcard from the Sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, where he follows in the footsteps of explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1916. Shackleton's ship, The Endurance, had sunk, and with two of his crew, Shackleton rowed and sailed for three weeks in a small open boat, and then walked across the glaciers to the whaling station on South Georgia. His first sight of the station, when he knew that at last he and his men would be safe, was a momentous occasion, and Simon Winchester tells us more from the very spot where Shackleton first saw the station:

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March 5th, 2009

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Simon Winchester about the Falkland Islands. Winchester visited the British territory 27 years after the United Kingdom and Argentina fought a war over these islands in the South Atlantic. He reflects on the what life is like on this remote Atlantic outpost then (1982) and now.

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March 2nd, 2009
This time Winchester sends us an audio postcard from an island that inspired Shakespeare.

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February 2nd, 2009

The Purple Islands (or Iles Purpuraires) played a big role in the history of the Atlantic Ocean dating back as far as the ancient Phoenician civilization. Simon Winchester explains all in an audio postcard that's postmarked the Purple Islands: