...one of the most fascinating and unusual new books I’ve read in some time. —Benjamin Shull
The Wall Street JournalHypnotic . . . Beautifully written and beautifully made. —W. M. Akers
The New York Times Book Review...a weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing history
and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown...—Edward Posnett The
GuardianMesmerizing . . . Original and often profound [The Bathysphere Book] is a moving
testament to the wonders of exploration.—Publishers Weekly Starred Review Imbued with the
adventurous spirit of science and exploration . . . [The Bathysphere Book is] an enchanting
cabinet of curiosities. —Kirkus Reviews A wide ranging philosophical and sensual account of
early deep sea exploration and its afterlives The Bathysphere Book begins with the first ever
voyage to the deep ocean in 1930 and expands to explore the adventures and entanglements of its
all-too-human participants at a time when the world still felt entirely new.In the summer of
1930 aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch marine biologist Gloria
Hollister sat on a crate writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to
her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3 000 feet into the sea.
There suspended by the cable dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the
bathysphere. Crumpled inside gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world
was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her describing previously unseen
creatures explosions of bioluminescence and strange effects of light and color.From this
momentous first encounter with the unknown depths The Bathysphere Book widens its scope to
explore a transforming and deeply paradoxical America as the first great skyscrapers rose
above New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. In prose that is magical atmospheric
and entirely engrossing Brad Fox dramatizes new visions of our planetary home delighting in
tales of the colorful characters who surrounded supported and participated in the dives—from
groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.The
Bathysphere Book is a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with over fifty full-color
images records from the original bathysphere logbooks and the moving story of surreptitious
romance between Beebe and Hollister that anchors their exploration. Brad Fox blurs the line
between poetry and research unearthing and rendering a visionary meeting with the unknown.
