Like all of Winchester’s books, interesting and full of both facts and the author’s beliefs. Was reminded that his true background is in geology . Particularly enjoyed the sections in the h bomb and on mount pinatubo ( )

I have enjoyed everything I have read by Simon Winchester, and this book a relatively earlier work, written in 1991, offers an insight into why he was soon to become admired by his peers in the genre (including Paul Theroux and Jan Morris). It is book of almost several books, one chapter ”Places in the Basin” containing six excellently descriptive essays from around the Pacific, is almost a book of travel narrative in itself. There are extensive exploration pieces on Apple and MS DOS, on my own former industry of telecommunications, on the under-sea “Transpac” cable networks being superseded by the newer technologies of telephony and satellites, and the advent of Fiber Optics. But being written 1991 the subsequent overwhelming of those technologies and indeed, the whole telecoms’ industry itself; by tablets and smart-phones, is of course missing.

It is this theme of evolving and change that the author details, but for the whole of the Pacific and the countries that rim this “tide-beating heart of the world” (Melville) and it is his proposition that it this “heart” that will dominate our future and replace the Atlantic (and broadly Protestant) culture and world leadership with a Pacific based and Confucian one. Indeed, he argues pretty convincingly – and to this reader at least, terrifyingly – that this has already happened.

Having orientated the reader – and this being Winchester a former geologist – by referencing the tectonic plates and rims of fire, a discourse on Gondwana bumping into Laurasia, the author explores this tide-beating heart in descriptions and statistics that demonstrate the fiscal domination of the world by the “new world people’, the shinjinrui of teeming, driven Japan. If Beijing is the “North Capital” of the emerging re-domination of the ancient “Middle Kingdom” which is the Eastern, asks Winchester? Not Tokyo, but that city described by Westbrook Pegler as ”a sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot”; Los Angeles, now some twenty percent owned by the Pacific combines and fast overtaking all other of the world’s financial centers.

This Pacific domination is not a new prediction, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward said “The Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands will become the great theatre of events in the world …henceforth European commerce, European thought … will sink in importance.”

My own doubts about the new leadership of the world were echoed by Max Weber in his writing, and by history professor J.M. Roberts in his BBC series “The Triumph of the West” where he contrasted the western and Atlantic discoveries and innovations – discovery of gravity, splitting the atom, painting ‘Sunflowers’, inventing the motor car, airplanes, and the writing of world-music – with the eastern invention of "fireworks, the paintings of the same birds on an endless successions of twigs and attempts to impose impossibly difficult alphabets" … they had discovered, he said, almost nothing and invented even less.

Now the arguments, Winchester claims, are being turned on their heads as the Pacific arises, the Protestant ethic stumble into tired decay and the Confucian tide sweeps into global leadership. He has, it seems, no doubts.