More Than Just Talking

摘要

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Desperate writers have long leaned on Charles Dudley Warner's supposed quip to start articles, often attributing it to Mark Twain. But Bernard Mergen's boisterous Weather Matters illustrates how talking is itself a kind of doing. Cultural discourse is our oldest and most effective technique for managing the weather; ideas and habits determine the weather's impact on our lives as much as air masses and jet streams do. Romping through a century of art, literature, humor, journalism, and science, Mer-gen shows how Americans have made the weather by talking about it.