Book Review
Author: Cynthia Barnett Crown Publishers ISBN 978-0-8041-3709-6
Review: C. Lacombe
When I came across a book called Rain, I had to add it to the list of books I review for Farming Smarter.
It turns out that rain captured human interest and impacted human lives through all the ages, cultures and religions. Cynthia Barnett took the time to research all those ways rain shaped human history and some of it surprized me. For instance, did you know we have a Korean King to thank for the invention of the rain gauge?
The book starts off talking about elemental rain. This is the rain that shaped our planet and allowed civilization to germinate. Of course, what follows that chapter is the struggle between civilization, drought and flood.
Rain is such an important part of all life that people began recording it almost as soon as we had the tools to do so in ancient Greece. An Italian, Evangelista Torricelli, discovered how to measure barometric pressure in 1643, but didn’t tell anyone for fear of religious persecution after watching the Inquisition of Galileo. Twenty years later, Robert Boyle named it barometer and launched a “weather prediction craze” across Europe and America.
I was amazed to find that citizen science started with weather watching back in the mid-1800s in England. The whole story of watching, recording and eventually TV forecasting shows impressive dedication by humanity.
I also had no idea that rain making pervaded human cultures down through the centuries. I thought that making rain fell into the same category as love spells not the United States government Defence Department! Never mind giving someone grief for believing that praying or dancing can call the rain, read what the U.S. spent on trying to create or manage rain through the last few hundred years. It’s a story for sure.
Another story is how rain affects art and has through the ages. I’m surprized this surprized me. Not because it doesn’t make sense, but because it makes perfect sense and I hadn’t thought about it before. Apparently, some of the world’s greatest writers and composers did their best work in dreary, rainy weather or places.
In the chapter called City Rains, Barnett talks with foreboding about the phenomenal efforts humanity makes to get just the right amount of water where we want it. She talks about modern city challenges where rain falls on hard surfaces and has only one flow path left open to it in many cities. Paths designed for a different climate with different rain patterns and now mostly overwhelmed.
The Strange Rains chapter is that for sure. I’m not sure how I would react if I saw frogs or fishes falling from the sky. I think we might be safe on the Alberta prairie from those incidents, but we might experience mud fall one day. This chapter made me realize that pollution came with the industrial age and things happened that I had never heard of before. Did you know that soot from industrial operations in London, England combined with fog and an inversion in 1952 that lasted five days and killed 12,000 people!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book for the information and perspectives it offers about a topic that is so common place that most people lift up their eyebrows at me when I tell them I read a book about rain. I had the same thought when I first saw the book online, “How does someone fill a whole book talking about rain?” Well, one chapter and one fascinating topic at a time, that’s how.