Book Review -- The Devil's Teeth, Susan Casey

The Devil's Teeth is the story of two marine biologists, Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson, who spent a decade studying great white sharks off the Farallon Islands, which lie just 30 miles west of San Francisco.

The title, The Devil's Teeth, doesn't refer to the sharks but rather to the islands themselves, a nickname they were given by sailors back in the1800s. It's an apt one. The islands rise up from the sea, canine-like, to form one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet. Fierce winds regularly whip them. The sea constantly pounds them. Hundreds of thousands of sea birds congregate to mate on them, cawing and screeching in a deafening cacophony like something straight out of the ninth circle of hell. Kelp flies swarm -- having already spent time lodged in the anuses of the local seal population. Death and destruction lie all around, from the countless birds pecked to death by other birds, to the seals and sea lions ripped apart in bloody spectacles by the sharks circling just offshore. There are only two houses on the islands and the revolving team of biologists who live in them swear they're haunted. But as the author, Susan Casey, points out, ghosts on the Farallons would simply be overkill. Their wild desolation -- how they repel the vast majority of people who set foot on them but suck in a tiny percentage who learn to love them -- is described beautifully throughout.

Back to the sharks, though. For several months a year, the Farallons are home to the one of the densest congregations of large great whites in the world. Thirteen-footers are considered runts. Pyle and Anderson spent years studying these animals as a neighborhood and can identify dozens of them on sight. They've managed to document their natural feeding habits, their hunting strategies, the tidal states in which they're most likely to strike and their behavior around other sharks. They've learned that their vision is probably better than we give them credit for and that while they don't swim in pods, they do seem to stay in loose aggregations.

The Devil's Teeth has some big flaws, though. First, for all that Pyle and Anderson have learned, little of it has made its way into the book. The information listed above is pretty much the sum total. Even then we're usually just told that they've learned something, not what they've learned. This lack of information does a great disservice to Pyle and Anderson. Without the results of their research to back them up, when we see them running down a hill at breakneck speed to launch a boat and witness a seal attack, or squaring off with a shark-cage diving operator that wants to observe the sharks as well, or just competing against each other to see who'll be the first to surf in the sharky waters, they come off as little more than adrenalin junkies who don't want to let anyone else in on the fun. This isn't the case, of course. At least I don't think it is.

The second problem is that the most interesting character in the book, an urchin diver named Ron Elliot who regularly scours the bottom here for urchins while massive great whites circle around, plays a minor role at best. We're told little of how he's managed to stay alive beyond his having some vague sense that a shark is nearby or when it means business. Sorry, that's just not enough.

These weaknesses notwithstanding, The Devil's Teeth is an interesting read, particularly if you're into adventure in desolate places.

The Devil's Teeth was published in 2005 by Henry Holt & Company.

Book Review -- Descent, Brad Matsen

Descent is the story of William Beebe's and Otis Barton's revolutionary exploration of the deep sea in the 1930s. I picked it up with memories of Beebe's exploits still locked in my mind from 4th grade history class. After studying about them, I ran home from school, picking up the largest cardboard box I could find and dragging it along. I then spent hours sitting inside, pretending to re-live Beebe's exploits. But even at the height of my hero worship, I didn't quite get what Beebe and Barton had done. They had a great adventure, yes, but was it really much of an achievement? I mean, all they did was sit inside a steel ball while it was raised and lowered on a cable. Obviously, there were a few gaps in my understanding. It's taken several decades but Descent finally filled those gaps in.

Long before Beebe ever heard of the bathysphere, he was a world-renowned ornithologist who made numerous helmet dives in the tropics, fell in love with the ocean and then made an abrupt career change -- with no formal education in marine science. Barton, his all-but-forgotten partner, was a rich kid who idolized him from afar. But he had what Beebe wanted -- a workable plan for a vessel that would take them into the ocean depths. The two men were formally introduced and formed an immediate partnership that would change deep-sea exploration forever.

The author, Brad Matsen, does a great job painting a picture of the life of explorers in the 1930s, trying to raise money and keep funds flowing during the Depression. He does an even better job describing the technical problems Barton and Beebe faced in building and operating the bathysphere. No one had experience with anything like this before. To withstand the water pressure thousands of feet beneath the surface, how large and thick would the portholes have to be? How could a watertight seal be made between the portholes and the sphere? Was there a cable in the world strong enough to raise and lower it? How could the cable be kept from tangling? And was there even a winch that could lift all three tons of it? None of this was known for sure.

When finally ready, Beebe and Barton sat inside the bathysphere on the deck of a ship covering their ears while workers outside spent long minutes hammering the metal hatch shut. Once underwater, they fanned palm leaves over trays of chemicals to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Based on how they felt, they guestimated when and how much oxygen to release into the bathysphere to keep their air breathable. \All the while, pressure was constantly forcing water into the cramped space.

In the end, Beebe and Barton saw and described sea creatures no one before them ever had ever seen. Their  undrewater trips were carried live on radio to a waiting nation, starved for heroes and escape from economic hardship. Unfortunately, though, neither of them attained what they had truly hoped for. Beebe was almost universally scorned in oceanographic circles as little more than a circus showman, while Barton never rose above the status of second banana.

Descent is a wonderful book and I can't wait to read it again. In the meantime, who knows, I might have to go out there and find myself another big old cardboard box.

Descent was published in 2005 by Pantheon Books.

Book Review -- Caverns Measureless To Man, Sheck Exley

If you've never heard of Sheck Exley, then chances are you've never spent much time in an underwater cave. Because when it came to underwater caving, Exley was, without a doubt, The Man. Even now, more than 15 years after his death, his accomplishments seem almost superhuman. And Caverns Measureless To Man is his diving autobiography (the title is taken from a line in the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem Kubla Khan).

Caverns opens with Exley's introduction to Florida's underwater caves during a Boy Scout trip to Silver Springs in the late 1950s. Armed with a mask and a pair of fins, he pokes his head underwater, sees the opening to a cave, and is never quite able to pull his head back out again.

Exley went on to survive the 1960s, the early days of Florida cave diving when divers who became trapped in inside were drowning in record numbers. From there, he helped explore the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, made numerous solo dives to depths in excess of 500 feet in caves in Mexico and South Africa. Along the way, he also experimented with mixed gasses, becoming one of the pioneers of tech diving, while experiencing numerous mind-altering incidents of High Pressure Nervous Syndrome.

Obviously, Exley's final dive, on which he drowned while in Mexican ceynote while at depth in excess of 900 feet, isn't covered in Caverns. He wasn't around to write about it. But he wrote just about everything else, though. Never have I read a more dive-intensive book than this. If it doesn't pertain to diving, he didn't put it in. So much so that, after a while, it actually gets a bit repetitious -- one mind-blowing dive after another. But that's no reason to not read Caverns. Exley was an incredible guy and it's staggering to read the things he did.

For a shorter account of his exploits and of the birth of tech diving that I wrote for Wired Magazine a few years back, click here.

Caverns Measureless to Man was published in 1994 by Cave Books.

Book Review -- Blue Meridian, Peter Matthiessen

Blue Meridian is the written account of Peter Gimbel's expedition to film white sharks for the documentary Blue Water, White Death in the late 1960s. Considering the greatness of that movie, and Matthiessen's own storied literary career, you'd expect any review of it to be sprinkled with stock lines such as "a real page-turner!" and "I couldn't put it down!" or the always popular "I didn't want it to end!" And then again, maybe not.

There's one major problem with Blue Meridian that almost completely sinks it. The book isn't simply a written version of the documentary but is, rather, Matthiessen's first-hand account of what went on behind the scenes during the filming. And because of the expedition's extended nature (it lasted months longer than it was supposed to) and Matthiessen's own prior commitments, he wasn't there for large chunks of it. These gaps in the story stand out like a proverbial white elephant, with Matthiessen attempting to convey (seemingly halfheartedly at times) what others told him had transpired in his absence. It just doesn't work.

But that's not to say that Blue Meridian is a total disappointment. It isn't. The sections written from Matthiessen's own experience can be pretty interesting, sometimes veering off quite a bit from the storyline of the movie. He particularly succeeds in flushing out Gimbel's personality in ways the documentary couldn't. For instance, Matthiessen's account of the testing in the Bahamas Gimbel did on the shark cages he built gives an incredible sense of the danger the divers placed themselves in just by entering them, but also of Gimbel's own pit bull nature. It's also amazing to see how lax training standards were then compared to today. Matthiessen basically received no formal dive training before being declared ready to jump in with the sharks (hey, there's an idea for PADI and NAUI -- a Shark Diver certification!). It's also interesting to see Matthiessen accurately predict that the travelogue footage of the the expedition showing the divers, Valerie Taylor in particular, interacting with various types of marine life in cute and cuddly ways, would be a major weak point in the film.

All in all, if you like Blue Water, White Death and are interested in more background info on it, Blue Meridian is a decent read. Other than that, the book, unfortunately, doesn't stand well on its own.

Blue Meridian was originally published in 1971 and is currently available from Penguin Nature Classics.