The Bathysphere Book

The Bathysphere Book is wonderful, in the literal sense: filled with wonder. Brad Fox illuminates the extraordinary discoveries of the ocean depths, to be sure, but also of the scientists and artists who first explored them, less than a century ago. To read this glorious and beautifully illustrated account-relayed with what its protagonist William Beebe called 'the oblique glance', the wisdom that everything is connected-is to feel again a child's awed delight at human ingenuity, and at our planet. -Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children and A Dream Life What is this sublime, remarkable book? It's a black unreadable eye sliding past a submarine window, it's a color on an alien spectrum, it's a fish made of filaments and lit by its own light. I don't know what it is, I only know that it's luminous. -Shelley Jackson, author of The Melancholy of Anatomy and Riddance Brad Fox has created a brilliant work of literary art-at once almanac and seance, wonder-cabinet and hallucinogen. The vigor, pluck, and compression of his language turn a linear chronicle into a time-bending, gem-laden constellation, with surprising flashes of wit, gossip, and melodrama. -Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Ultramarine and The Cheerful Scapegoat Brad Fox knows that the descent into the deep meant a sea-change not just in science, but in aesthetics, philosophy, the sense of what it is to be human. All have been changed, become rich and strange, as this rich, strange book shows so beautifully. -China Mieville, author of The City in the City and This Census-Taker