Showing posts with label Book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Book Review -- On A Farther Shore, William Souder

Rachel Carson is barely remembered today but through the 1950s and 60s, her name was as recognizable as that of any movie star or pro athlete. The author of four books -- the first three, beautifully written treatises on just about everything then known of the oceans; the fourth, a world-shaking attack on the overuse of pesticides -- she was just as likely to be the topic of conversation at any family dinner table as at one of President Kennedy’s press conferences. She was big.

I’ve always had a bit of a mixed relationship with her books, though. On the one hand, from the first time I picked up a copy of The Sea Around Us in junior high, I loved the thought of Rachel Carson. I loved that most of what she wrote centered on the ocean. I loved that she made it seem possible to have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of a vast subject. I even loved the somewhat dowdy photo of her on the back cover of the book.

On the other hand, I have to admit that I was never quite able -- then or now -- to make it all the way through any of her books. As beautifully written as her ocean books are, they’re too general for me. I prefer more detail over a smaller range. As for Silent Spring -- her attack on the overuse of pesticides -- I found the fact that such a book even had to written too maddeningly frustrating.to stay with from cover to cover. (But the truth is that you can still hear the ignorant blaming Carson for the deaths of millions from malaria.)

Through all these years, though, Carson herself remained a shadowy figure about whom -- with the exception of that back cover photo -- I knew little. When the biography On A Farther Shore came out, I decided to rectify that.

The book does a decent job of showing us that much of Carson’s early adult life gave little hint of the success she would have or the mark she would leave. An above-average student from a poor family, she graduated from a women’s college with a degree in a biology, and wound up at the Bureau of Fisheries, a federal agency that would eventually become the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Her job was not as a scientist, though, but as a writer, taking scientific reports, distilling them down to their essence, and then writing them in language a layman could understand.

The work brought her into contact with countless marine scientists, many of whom she developed working relationships with, some of whom encouraged her toward work beyond what she was already doing. Her first step in that direction, the book Under The Sea-Wind, was a minor success at best. The second, however, The Sea Around Us, spent months on the best-seller list and catapulted Carson to fame. Its follow-up, The Edge Of The Sea, did almost as well.

The details that emerge of Carson during this period are a study of contradictions. She did little to dissuade the misperception of herself as a scientist and a diver (she had made one helmet dive off the coast of Florida, during which she never let go of the boat’s ladder). The combination of ill-health and inveterate re-writing meant that her books were generally finished years behind schedule. She sought almost no publicity for herself. She never hesitated to complain to her publishers about even the slightest of grievances she felt had been committed against her books. When she agreed to the making of a documentary based on The Sea Around Us, it was produced by Irwin Allen, of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure fame. It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1953 but Carson hated it as overly sensational. Before it was made, though, she had had the chance to work with a young Jacques Cousteau instead. She decided against it.

The picture that emerges of Carson is of an exceedingly private, quiet but confident woman, who seemed an unlikely protagonist in the war against the giant chemical industry. Silent Spring -- the events that eventually convinced her to write it, the research that went into it, the years it took to finish it, and the battles that were fought after its publication, take up nearly the second half of On A Farther Shore. And, for me, that imbalance is where much of the difficulty of the book lies. By comparison, the details of the research, the trials and tribulations, and the thought processes that went into Carson’s three ocean books are barely touched upon. And since that’s where my interest lies, it’s a disappointment.

Still, On A Farther Shore does a good job filling in the blanks of Carson’s life. And it’s a life that should be remembered because, without her and Silent Spring, the environmental movement as we know it today probably wouldn’t exist. More importantly, the way in which Carson first staked the battle against the chemical industry and its close ties with its supposed regulators, and the manner in which she then calmly defended her work against a barrage of blustery attacks -- weirdly reminiscent of those used today against anyone raising environmental warnings -- provides a strong intellectual blueprint against hyperbole and in defense of the environment.

It was published in 2012 by Crown Publishers.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Book Review -- Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson

I picked up Shadow Divers with very low expectations. The story of the U-Who had already been told in numerous media and the fact that the book was a best seller just convinced me that it would turn out to be so much schlock. I was wrong.

Shadow Divers is the story of two men, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, who find themselves thrust together while diving the wreck of an unidentified U-boat off the coast of New Jersey. The motives and methodologies of the two men, both in life and in diving, seem polar opposites. Chatterton lives a tenaciously disciplined life in which he consistently strives to do the honorable thing. Kohler prefers to keep things a bit looser, drinking to excess, mooning families on passing boats and pulling up as many artifacts as he can from the wrecks he dives. Not surprisingly, the two start off not liking each other.

Equally unsurprising is the fact that they turn out to have a lot more in common than they initially believe. Both have more than a passing interest in U-boats. Both are able to look past the subs' Nazi origins to see the characters of the men who manned them. And both are committed to doing whatever it takes to discover the identity of this particular one -- which lies in a place where no U-boat is supposed to be.

To the uninitiated, it would seem a simple matter to discover the identity of a wreck. Someone must have reported a sinking. Somewhere a name must be engraved or stenciled in. At the very least, there must be some mention of a crewman. Well, not in this case. Whatever secrets the U-Who has, it doesn't give them up easily. It lies in 230 feet of water and its interior is a nightmare combination of silt, skeletons, hanging cables and caved-in pieces of machinery. Of the first six divers who enter it, three lose their lives. Still, dive after dive, year after year, Chatterton and Kohler devise new plans to find some marking, carry those plans out perfectly and then come up empty.

I get the feeling that the author, Robert Kurson, is not a diver. If this is the case, then his ability to describe the dangers and claustrophobia of deep wreck diving is remarkable. And the human side of this story is nothing to sneeze at either. I actually got a little verklempt near the end -- that's the first time that's happened while reading a wreck diving book!

Despite my original misgivings, Shadow Divers is a very good book.

It was published by Random House in 2004.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Book Review -- The Dive, Pipin Ferreras

I picked up The Dive by Francisco "Pipin" Ferreras with great trepidation. The book is the story of how Ferreras, the world-record holder in the extreme sport of no-limits freediving, met and fell in love with his wife Audrey Mestre, how she then became a freediver as well, and how she went on to die during a record-breaking dive attempt under his supervision.

Now, to write effectively about lost love -- one of the most difficult things there is to do -- you need to have a very, very light touch. But when you consider that Ferreras has never really written anything before, that English is not his first language and that he is something of a mystic/romantic, you have the potential for some very purple prose.

But there was no way I could skip the book. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to spend time in Miami with Ferreras and Mestre while working on a magazine profile of them. Watching Ferreras move easily up and down through the water, holding his breath for minutes at a time as if having no need whatsoever to breathe, was a humbling experience. And Mestre was a stunningly beautiful, extremely serious woman who seemed to have made very clear decisions on what was important and what wasn't. She was always polite to me, but as a member of the media, I fell into the category of unimportant. Still, I came away thinking that they were both unique people -- people that you just knew were somehow operating on a different level.

For those of you who aren't up on the sport of competitive freediving, it's a strange one. There are three categories: constant weight, where divers swim down and then back up again completely under their own power, wearing the same amount of weight throughout; variable weight, where divers sit on a weighted sled as it drops through the water, then stop and ascend under their own power; and no-limits -- Ferreras' specialty -- where divers ride the weighted sled down, then inflate a lift bag that rockets them back to the surface. And, of course, they do it all while holding their breath.

Ferreras devotes the beginning of The Dive to his rise to international stardom in Europe as a freediver representing Cuba (freediving is a popular spectator sport in many Mediterranean countries), his chafing under the communist system, his personal dealings with Fidel Castro, and his eventual defection. It's all interesting stuff. When he gets to Mestre, however, sure enough, the prose turns a fairly deep shade of purple. Let's face it, some of the world's great writers have difficulty with this stuff. But once Ferreras moves past the early stages of their relationship, he gets back on track -- their efforts to popularize the sport in the US, his record-breaking dives to depths well in excess of 500 feet, the accidents that take their toll on him physically, and Mestre's emergence as a freediver herself.

The final third of the book is devoted to Mestre's last dive and is as compelling as anything I've ever read. Reacting perhaps to his own temporary inability to dive due to injuries, Ferreras plans with Mestre for her to make a no-limits breath-hold dive that will not only break the women's record, but break his record as well -- a dive to 590 feet. The day of the dive is described in excruciating detail, from the weirdly casual approach made to equipment checks and operating procedures, to the circus-like atmosphere on the surface while Mestre tried to enter into the meditative state necessary for such a dive, to the long minutes on the surface well after she should have ascended but hadn't. This is all very good stuff.

I'm happy to say that The Dive is a good read.

It was published in 2005 by Regan Books.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Book Review -- Sea Salt, Stan Waterman

Stan Waterman is one of the pre-eminent underwater photographers in the world, and has been for decades. With that in mind, there's no way not to get excited about anything that he writes.

As the subtitle of the book says, though, Sea Salt is a collection of memoirs and essays -- not a strict autobiography -- so it doesn't cover every aspect and time period of his life. And it's not all about diving. In fact, while the book follows a linear path through Waterman's life, there's no predicting who or what he'll write about on the next page. If something caught his fancy, he includes it. If it didn't, he doesn't.

As a diver, though, everything you could want is here. Waterman discusses his introduction to the underwater world, his first days diving, his early years on the dive lecture circuit, and the countless adventures, from the story behind the classic Blue Water, White Death to diving ancient wrecks in the Aegean. Naturally, there are a lot of shark stories.

Waterman also doesn't shy away from things he and his companions did in the past that would definitely be frowned upon today. And he does it all in the easy tones of his Old World charm -- so much so that it often feels as if he's sitting there beside you, telling the stories himself.

As much as I enjoyed this book, though, I often found myself skimming past those sections that were not dive-related. That being said, I never had far to go to get to a part I couldn't wait to read.

Sea Salt was published in 2005 by New World Publications.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Book Review -- The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, Carol Grant Gould

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe sat on my shelf for more than a year before I picked it up. The truth is I wasn't that interested. While Beebe was a childhood hero of mine, that status was based solely on his exploits as the first deep-sea explorer. But his life had been much more than that and unlike the other recent Beebe book, Descent, The Remarkable Life takes it all into account -- his career as a world-renowned ornithologist, a naturalist extraordinaire, prolific best-selling author and mentor to countless young scientists eager to follow in his footsteps. Despite my lack of interest in any of these subject areas, though, I gave it a shot.

I'm glad I did. The picture that emerges of Beebe is indeed a remarkable one. He starts life as a young boy obsessed with collecting, categorizing and understanding the wildlife around him, and then carries that obsession with him straight through the next eighty-plus years in a single-minded pursuit of knowledge that sharpens, but never varies. And all that stuff I was wasn't interested in ... well, it's pretty interesting.

The key point for me, though, and for anyone principally interested in Beebe as an ocean explorer, is that The Remarkable Life puts it all into context. We see that Beebe didn't just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields from ornithology to marine biology. Of the many expeditions he had made to study tropical birds, each began and ended with a long ocean voyage. During those voyages, Beebe's boundless curiousity had no where to turn but the water around him. He was constantly trawling for fish, observing invertebrates, collecting saragassum. It was only a matter of time before too many questions had been raised, too much curiousity piqued.

We also see how his study of wildlife evolved from the Victorian model of a naturalist looking at each animal species in a vaccuum, removed from its environment, to a wholistic approach taking it all into account -- the weather, the seasons, its competitors for food and mates, its predators and prey, etc. Rather than making a simple study of birds in a rainforest, he mapped out a quarter-mile square in that forest to study the inter-relationships of everything in it from the ground up to the tree canopy. At a time when the rest of the scientific world was beginning to prize specialization, Beebe was, of neccessity, casting his own observational net wider and wider. It's only natural that he found no barriers preventing him from moving his field of study from that of birds, to marine life, and then back again.

Beyond that, we see Beebe's own extraordinary social life, in which he counted among his friends and acquaintances Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Hepburn, and A.A. Milne, to name just a few. He was also among the first of his generation to encourage the women around him to pursue their own scientific studies and both of his wives had successful writing careers of their own. He was truly a man ahead of his time.

The Remarkable Life captures all of this and more. It doesn't examine his adventures in the bathysphere to the same degree of detail that Descent does, and nor should it. But it's no exageration to say that it does put everything in Descent into a whole new prespective. The Remarkable Life of William Beebe is a wonderful book.

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe was published by Island Press in 2004.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Book Review -- Dragon Sea, Frank Pope

Dragon Sea is the story of an underwater archaeological dig that took place off the coast of Vietnam. For those of you not up on archaeology and its hierarchies, marine archaeology is typically held in low regard by its land-based brothers -- the provenance of adventurers and Indiana Jones-type wannabees, one step above treasure hunting.

Understanding this is crucial to understanding the main conflict of Dragon Sea. When the leader of Oxford's underwater archaeology department, Mensun Bound (you might remember him as the host of the old Discovery Channel show, Lost Ships), is approached by a known treasure hunter, Ong Soo Hin, and asked to to help him raise precious porcelain cargo from a sunken 15th Century junk to sell at auction, the obvious answer for him is to say no and avoid further castigation from colleagues. The problem is that the wreck lies in deep water, beyond the range of the volunteer scuba divers he typically uses. This wreck can only be worked by saturation divers, earning big bucks and with a world of expensive technology above them, all of which Ong is willing to pay for -- along with the promise that Bound will be allowed carry out his archaeological investigations at the same time.

Bound puts his reputation on the line and accepts Ong's offer, realizing there's no other way that this historically significant ship could ever be excavated. As much as Bound is reliant on Ong, though, so is Ong reliant to him -- unless Bound reports that he was allowed to carry out a full-scale investigation of the ship, the government of Vietnam won't allow Ong to remove the cargo for sale outside the country. The fortunes of the archaeologist and the treasure hunter are intertwined in the first such collaboration ever.

The potential problems are obvious from the start: the operation costs Ong tens of thousands of dollars a day  and he wants it completed as quickly as possible. Every day that Bound spends studying the wreck, is another day that the tab goes up. And, course, unexpected problems pop up all along the way.

It's a great story with a great premise. The author does have some annoying habits, such as ending each mini-chapter on some kind of cliff-hanging note, most of which turn out to be red herrings. He also has some strange ideas about diving, such as how the air in a scuba tank is compressed as the diver goes deeper. But these are relatively minor affairs. All in all, Dragon Sea is an excellent read.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

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.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

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.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

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.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

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.