The book cover for Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, featuring a black umbrella with tiny geometric raindrops in the background
The book cover for Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, featuring a black umbrella with tiny geometric raindrops in the background

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History — Paperback

$22.00

  • Longlisted for the National Book Award

  • A finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing

  • Gold medal, best nonfiction, The Florida Book Awards

  • An NPR Science Friday Best Book of the Year

  • A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year

  • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

  • A Tampa Bay Times Favorite Book of the Year

  • A Miami Herald Favorite Book of the Year

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science – the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains – with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume.

Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

If you’d like your copy inscribed, please note to whom on the next screen—and any special occasion such as a birthday gift, or special connection to freshwater, rain or the sea that would allow her to personalize the inscription.

  • Longlisted for the National Book Award

  • A finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing

  • Gold medal, best nonfiction, The Florida Book Awards

  • An NPR Science Friday Best Book of the Year

  • A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year

  • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

  • A Tampa Bay Times Favorite Book of the Year

  • A Miami Herald Favorite Book of the Year

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science – the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains – with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume.

Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

If you’d like your copy inscribed, please note to whom on the next screen—and any special occasion such as a birthday gift, or special connection to freshwater, rain or the sea that would allow her to personalize the inscription.

Praise for Rain

"Rain is a lovely, lyrical, deeply informative book. It will change the way you look at gray skies, and sunny ones, too." —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

 “In Rain, Cynthia Barnett has given us a landmark work of environmental history. She brilliantly illuminates the essential weather conditions that allow our blue-marble earth to exist. From now on I'll think about raindrops differently. Rain is a triumph.” —Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior; professor of history, Rice University 

"Rain—the thing the weatherman frowns about—is one of the planet's great pulses, as this marvelous book makes clear. Read it now, recalling the rainstorms we grew up with, and anticipating the harsh new rainfall that's coming our way on a warming globe." —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth

 "Brilliant, insightful, and beautifully written. Raindrops are prisms through which we see the surprising and profound connections among water, human history, and our uncertain future." —David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen; professor of biology, University of the South

"Some of the most lyrical and surprising nature writing that I have ever read. This book is filled with wonder, as mysterious as the shape of a falling raindrop, which is not the drop we imagine, but a concave little parachute drifting to the earth below. After reading this, you will never look up the same way again." —Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods