Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation's Science + Literature Award A Washington Post top
10 best book of 2023 A Publishers Weekly best nonfiction book of 2023 "Hypnotic . . .
Beautifully written and beautifully made." — W. M. Akers The New York Times Book Review "one
of the most beautiful books-as-objects of the year" — The Globe and Mail "...one of the most
fascinating and unusual new books I’ve read in some time." — Benjamin Shull The Wall Street
Journal "...a weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing history and poetry that
explores our own relationship with the unknown..." — Edward Posnett The Guardian
"Mesmerizing . . . 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.
