“A superb book… a delight to read. It is profound and powerful, and should win prizes” — so declared the Sunday Times, which also named Tide a ‘Must Read’ and described its author as “a gently studious Bill Bryson crossed with an upbeat and relaxed WG Sebald.” Half of the world’s population lives along coastlines shaped by tidal waters, yet the tide — one of the most powerful and consequential forces on our planet — remains surprisingly little understood. Hugh Aldersey-Williams changes that, tracing the tide’s influence across centuries of science and thousands of years of human history. The story moves from Aristotle’s early observations and Newton’s theories through to the supercomputer models that allow us to predict tidal behaviour today. Along the way, it pauses at some of history’s most dramatic tidal moments: Caesar’s thwarted attempt to invade Britain, the catastrophic flooding of Venice, and the Allied forces’ meticulous calculations ahead of D-Day. Threaded through the science and the history is a rich seam of folklore that has fed art and literature from the time of Cnut to the present day. With Aldersey-Williams as guide, readers are taken to the world’s most formidable tidal locations — the original maelstrom off the Scandinavian coast, the record-breaking tides of Nova Scotia, and the eroding shores of East Anglia — to understand, perhaps for the first time, just how profoundly the tide has shaped civilisation and what it may yet do to our future.
ISBN 13: 9780241967980
Author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams
