SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
Actor Jay Snyder voices Bill Streever's blend of personal experience, history, and updates on ocean exploration with both awe and clarity. The author urges listeners toward a new appreciation of oceans. Some listeners might be wary, though, when Snyder is calmly recounting the hazards of free diving, which include spitting up blood and loss of consciousness. The author's enthusiasm when trying free diving himself also comes through. Snyder's voice expresses genuine emotion as he shares the last messages of sailors caught in a submarine explosion. Most listeners won't be able to keep up with Streever—and won't want to. But they’ll likely be fascinated as he recounts his tales. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
05/27/2019
Diver and biologist Streever (Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places) fascinatingly recounts humanity’s expeditions beneath the sea in this informative and personal chronicle. With a real knack for storytelling, Streever evocatively puts the reader in the helmets, flippers, and submersibles of sea explorers throughout history. He grippingly recounts the daring, seven-mile journey of Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard aboard their “ungainly submersible” Trieste to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep, in 1960; only filmmaker James Cameron has returned to that point, meaning nine more people have gone to the moon than have visited the darkest depths of the ocean. Streever then examines the free diving of 19th-century Greek sponge collectors; the air pressure experiments of 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle; the advent of diving helmets, decompression chambers, and scuba gear; and the evolution of submarines, from the Revolutionary War–era Turtle, to the diesel-powered submarines of both World Wars, to today’s nuclear-powered behemoths. Streever also shares accounts of his time as an oil field diver and his current dabbling with free diving and operating undersea robots. Writing at the behest of his late father, “my first diving partner,” and concluding with a look at how diving contributes to ocean conservation, Streever crafts a book to be enjoyed by divers and general readers alike. (July)
From the Publisher
"A broad-spectrum examination of underwater adventuring...Mr. Streever's writing is lucid on subjects ranging from gas chemistry to dredging to underwater robotics."—Wall Street Journal
"A fascinating...journey for readers into a little-known world."—Anchorage Daily News
"A fine writer with genuine sea credentials...Streever's book makes clear that the deep, though much closer to us, is still tantalizingly distant."—Natural History Magazine
"In this homage-cum-history of human endeavor in the ocean depths, biologist, writer and diver Bill Streever brings to light a region less explored than the Moon."—Nature Magazine
"With a real knack for storytelling, Streever evocatively puts the reader in the helmets, flippers, and submersibles of sea explorers throughout history...Streever crafts a book to be enjoyed by divers and general readers alike."— Publishers Weekly
"Ultimately, this timely and richly told story became something the author did not intend: an invaluable survey of how much damage has
been done and how much we will lose if we don't protect the seas."—Booklist
"A buoyant, at times thrilling, account of the deep sea experience, perfect for divers and other lovers of life beneath the waves."— Kirkus Review
"Streever tells a story that captures human fascination with the ocean, and encourages readers to become more interested in what lies beneath the waves."—Shelf Awareness
Bill Streever has written a gripping and important book about the sea, its science, and the technologies we've invented to begin to experience it, but also about our own humanity-and our future. I loved following him on this extraordinary deep dive into the largest and still most mysterious realm of this incredible planet we all share—JuliBerwald, author of Spineless
In Oceans Deep combines painstaking research with narrative flair and a genuine love for the subject...It is both an education and a terrific read—ChrisWright journalist and author of No MoreWorlds to Conquer
A beautifully written and thrilling exploration of humanity's place in the depths by a master interpreter who has spent a lifetime face-to-face with the shipwrecks, animals, machines, daring souls, and enduring mysteries that populate this gorgeous, hidden world."—RobertKurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men
Exquisitely researched and written, I highly recommend In Oceans Deep—Jonathan White, author of Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean
Bill Streever takes us on an entertaining and richly informative journey into the marine frontier. I recommend this book to anyone who may wish to be awed, and perhaps disturbed, by the depths to which humans will go to explore it."—JonathanBalcombe, author of What a Fish Knows
SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
Actor Jay Snyder voices Bill Streever's blend of personal experience, history, and updates on ocean exploration with both awe and clarity. The author urges listeners toward a new appreciation of oceans. Some listeners might be wary, though, when Snyder is calmly recounting the hazards of free diving, which include spitting up blood and loss of consciousness. The author's enthusiasm when trying free diving himself also comes through. Snyder's voice expresses genuine emotion as he shares the last messages of sailors caught in a submarine explosion. Most listeners won't be able to keep up with Streever—and won't want to. But they’ll likely be fascinated as he recounts his tales. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-04-28
The story of humanity's presence in the deep sea, as told by diver and research biologist Streever (And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind: A Natural History of Moving Air, 2016, etc.).
"I wanted readers to embrace the part of our world that is shrouded by depth," writes the author at the beginning of this broad survey of "people underwater, about the challenges of getting there, being there, and returning to the surface." Writing in the conversational style that has marked his previous books, Streever begins with the 1960 descent of the Trieste submersible into the deepest of the ocean floors, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. It was a remarkable achievement, and the author rides the feat down—here is where scuba tanks implode, here is where the walls of a typical submarine would fail—to the bottom, where the pressure was measured at 16,883 pounds per square inch. This leads into a chapter on the all-consuming role of pressure on diving and its exertion not just on submersibles, but on the human body as well. The author, who lives aboard a cruising sailboat with his wife, offers a solid examination of the behavior of gases as one goes deeper under the waves. There is a smart chapter on breathing as the key to understanding diving, including exhale diving, apnea diving, and free diving. Regarding the last, during the ascent, the pressure in the lungs drops and oxygen in the tissues and blood flows back into the lungs, and the "diver may or may not notice the fading of consciousness." Although the author discusses the many joys of deep diving both in and out of submersibles, he also emphasizes the perils of going beyond your capabilities. These include everything from working for sustained periods in deep water and relying on exotic gas mixtures to prevent such events as nitrogen narcosis to the fortunes and follies of the first submarines.
A buoyant, at times thrilling, account of the deep sea experience, perfect for divers and other lovers of life beneath the waves.
