About book Seven Tenths: The Sea And Its Thresholds (2007)
This is a very good read. At first I was a bit put off by the author's literary style. He tended to over do some of his similes, analogies and image portrayals. The first chapter is a largely technical treatise (aboard a British vessel doing sea floor mapping for USGS), so I guess he wanted to keep the interest of his technophobic readers but it just seemed too flowery at times. I am always glad when I stay with a book that might otherwise send me away and it turns out to be worth the stay. The author eventually settles in to his theme and every chapter provided to me a new way to consider various topics on the oceans theme.p. 33 "It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, ... [god] uttered some solid nouns ..."His chapter on "Islands and Boundaries" is particularly insightful and interesting. I have been a student of island phenomena for many years, but he manages to make me think about some aspects of islands in ways I hadn't considered.p. 89 "...coral reefs are true borderlands, abounding in all sorts of ambiguity."The chapter on Fishing authoritative. He clearly understands the trajectories of the commercial industry. It's even more interesting to me what these trajectories imply about humans as force for good or ill on the planet. It's not pretty either. p. 207 "In this single century we've slaughtered a thousand times more people than all the Genghis Khans of history put together. Into the bargain we've laid waste to our planet. Not bad going for a mere hundred years."I never really understood what his "overlay" tale, of a swimmer separated from his boat in the middle of the ocean, is about. It seemed unconnected except for the obvious. It didn't work for me.
I love this book. Each and every one of us on the planet could write a book about the ocean, and none of us would come up with Hamilton-Paterson's odd mix of tales: a swimmer at sea who cannot find his boat; a small, uninhabited island in the Philippines before and after Japanese developers turn it into a resort; imagining the last hours of the sailors on a doomed submarine; the peculiarity of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor; the old belief that bodies and ships "sink to their level" instead of to the bottom; a group of Filipino fishermen who live at sea; and the moral hazards of finding a dead man in a small boat out at sea.My favorite story comes when the author wants to know what a coral reef sounds like. To find out he dives down onto the reef during a cloudy night so he can't see a thing and be distracted by his vision. Holding his breath and clinging to the reef, he listens to crabs walk across the coral, fish swim by, then, every once in a while, all the creatures go silent all at once. "What do they know that I don't?" he wonders. There's a man after my own heart.
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