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A review by snoakes7001
Where the Wild Winds Are: Walking Europe's Winds from the Pennines to Provence by Nick Hunt
4.0
To create a successful travelogue an author needs a quest, something to give the journey purpose. In Where the Wild Winds Are Nick Hunt travels Europe in search of four named winds: the Helm that blows over the Pennines, the Bora on the Adriatic coast, the Foehn through Switzerland and into the Alps, and finally the one most people have heard of, the Mistral. For each he walks a route that is most likely to ensure that he encounters these winds in all their exhilarating if sometimes terrifying power.
There's a lot to enjoy in this book - as well as the inevitable meteorology and geography, there's history, myth and a smattering of psychology of the weather - how these winds affect the temperaments of those who live permanently in their paths. He meets some fascinating, kind and frequently eccentric people and the places he visits are vividly described. The walks in between are sometimes hard, often monotonously bleak and windswept and the effort expended in each stage drips off the page.
His most evocative passages come when he is describing the winds:
"Vertical bands of spindrift waltzed far out over the lake, roaring walls of spume that savaged the water’s surface. Occasionally one would form into a whirling cylinder that galloped from shore to shore before shedding itself in veils, carving shallow runes that erased themselves as they formed. I had seen this wind-writing before, in the snow of a Croatian mountainside, and stood for a long time reading new meanings in its script: that wild calligraphy described my happiness better than my own words ever could. When I finally turned inland, my face ached from smiling."
Recommended for the armchair meteorologist or traveller.
There's a lot to enjoy in this book - as well as the inevitable meteorology and geography, there's history, myth and a smattering of psychology of the weather - how these winds affect the temperaments of those who live permanently in their paths. He meets some fascinating, kind and frequently eccentric people and the places he visits are vividly described. The walks in between are sometimes hard, often monotonously bleak and windswept and the effort expended in each stage drips off the page.
His most evocative passages come when he is describing the winds:
"Vertical bands of spindrift waltzed far out over the lake, roaring walls of spume that savaged the water’s surface. Occasionally one would form into a whirling cylinder that galloped from shore to shore before shedding itself in veils, carving shallow runes that erased themselves as they formed. I had seen this wind-writing before, in the snow of a Croatian mountainside, and stood for a long time reading new meanings in its script: that wild calligraphy described my happiness better than my own words ever could. When I finally turned inland, my face ached from smiling."
Recommended for the armchair meteorologist or traveller.