Hiding Everywhere
By Marjory Hall
Hi! Marjory Hall here from Goodwell, Oklahoma, back with another BookByte for the Radio Reader’s Fall, 2026 season. One of my favorite elements of participating in a book club is the enjoyment of reading a great book that I would never have chosen on my own. This has been the case with Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind.
Living in the Oklahoma Panhandle, I confess that I don’t always have a lot of good things to say about wind. I tend to make use of adjectives like scorching, miserable, and annoying. It never occurred to me that there is so much about the wind to think about.
Aside from checking the forecast to know if I could expect pleasant breezes or blast-furnace gusts rendering hot, dry air even hotter and drier, I don’t normally give much thought to the wind. Watson’s book, though, presents the wind in a wide selection of unexpected ways. A quick scan of the table of contents intrigued me—biology of wind? philosophy of wind? I was hooked before I even began to read the book.
Watson’s content does not disappoint. Although I’ve never been a “sciencey” person, I found the scientific content fascinating. Watson communicates a great deal of technical information in a way that is engaging and clear for readers of any background. It wasn’t long before I found myself looking at the clouds with curiosity, applying what I had learned instead of just hoping for rain. Our enormous High Plains skies are a perfect place to observe and appreciate the visible aspects of the wind.
Even more surprising to me was the book’s discussion of the planets. I had never connected the atmosphere with the composition of the planets in our solar system.
The fun of Heaven’s Breath is that Watson so clearly shares the sense of wonder he invokes in his reader. He can move from elegant Biblical allusion to the Earth’s being “without form and void” to describing the planet as belching—his imaginative description of the Big Bang.
Over the course of 400 pages, the author seamlessly combines perspectives from physicists and geographers, preliterate cultures observing the world around them, and the rich trove of mythological musings on the wind. This book swept me into its myriad representations of an element of the world that is usually overlooked but that holds the power of shaping our universe and all it contains.
In a way, Watson presents the wind as a sort of metaphor for itself. The wind is intangible in its properties even though its impact is tangible in every aspect of life. Its scientific properties will never be fully understood and cannot be controlled, just like the phenomenon of the wind itself—intensely scrutinized yet always inscrutable. According to Watson, on close inspection, “[o]ur air begins to look more and more like an artefact, like something made by, and maintained by, living things for their own ends. In other words, life defines the conditions necessary for its own survival and somehow makes sure that they stay there” by means of the countless effects of the wind (27-28).
I’m Marjory Hall for HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club.
