THE MEN WHO UNITED THE STATES

(*November 11th for UK)

Further details - including ten-city US book tour - as they become available.

Find out more on C-PAN.org

an evening visit, a friendly social call.

Today, and for the past hundred years or so, the word has come to mean

a session of traditional music, storytelling, or dancing

all of which is these days often augmented (and often greatly improved by being so) with ample quantities of usquebaugh. Such gatherings are a lot of fun: most birthdays, bar-mitzvahs and even the coming holidays tend to pale beside a full-blown Highland ceilidh, though their hangovers are seldom so memorable.

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, 2009In 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, 2009Anchor 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, 2009The 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:

As it happens the first sense of Job in English also stems from a surname. The Biblically-recorded patriarch of the land named Uz was named Iobe, and as the story has it, he was man revered for enduring poverty and privation. So legendary was his stoicism, indeed,  that his name - which since the 13th century has been given an affricative, and rendered as Job - has come to stand for a figure with endless patience and fortitude.

More commonly - though lexicographically a little more puzzling - the word job , without a capital initial, has also come to mean

A piece of work; esp. a small and discrete piece of work done as part of one's regular occupation or profession.

The first use of this sense is recorded in 1557. There is a continuing debate, however. It ranges around whether this word - of unknown origin, it has to be confessed - first strictly meant just a piece of work, or whether it meant a piece of the results of work. For there is sense, dating from three years later, 1560, where jobbe (as it was then spelled) came to be used to designate

 A cartload; the amount that a horse and cart can bring at one time

Scholars are still searching for which of these senses (and there are many more) truly came first. It is part of the great joy of the lexicographic art that so many still feel compelled to track down just what a well-known English word really meant, at the moment it was first gathered into our language.

That small controversy aside, one thing is for sure, however: in the nicest possible sense, Steve Jobs himself was indeed a piece of work, unique and unforgettable. Appositely named, maybe, though with a hint of an enduring enigma about him also.

disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable; also in the wider sense, bad, evilly-disposed, "naughty".

We've had violent and dreadful weather in the American north-east this past few days, as Hurricane Irene has swept through ungovernably, from the Carolinas to Vermont. It would be entirely proper to describe our weather as froward, much as Lord Russell was once described as "froward, arrogant and mutinous." Nasty, bad, ill-disposed - Lords and hurricanes, all of a piece.

a batrachian reptile (Siredon pisciforme, family Proteidae) found in Mexican lakes, resembling a salamander in appearance but, like all the Proteidae,retaining through life the gills of its young state.

And why batrachian? Dictionary definitions are not supposed to include words more complex than the one being defined, and I venture to suspect that few will know what batrachian means. Well, your misery is over: it is from the Greek word for frog - and it signifies in this case that the axolotl is froglike and does not, like a salamander, have a tail.

But these days also have a more formal name, to the religious and astronomically-minded. These are the canicular days, or

the days immediately preceding and following the heliacal (in modern times, according to some, the cosmical) rising of the Dog-Star (either Sirius or Procyon,) which is about the 11th August.

The canicular cycle is the ancient Egyptian period of 1,461 years of 365 days each (or 1,460 Julian years) - a period during which each of the 365 days would have passed through (or so the ancient Egyptians wrongly supposed)  all the seasons of a natural year.