Published: 06/07/2023

A delightfully eccentric melange of nature writing, popular science and poetic storytelling, Fox's tour de force is a love letter to the magic of the ocean, the vision of maverick scientists and a period of historic discovery.
11 June, 1930. On a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, a curious steel ball is lowered 3000 feet into the sea. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch thick quartz windows, sits the famed zoologist William Beebe. With uncontrollable excitement, he watches as bizarre, never-before-seen creatures flit out of the inky blackness, illuminated by explosions of bioluminescence. He is the first person to witness this alien world.
Beebe's dives take place against the backdrop of a transforming and paradoxical America, home to ground-breaking scientists, eccentric adventurers, and eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the ocean's crushing pressure, scientific expectations disintegrate; the colour spectrum shatters into new dimensions; outlandish organisms thrive where no one expected them.
The Bathysphere Book blends research, storytelling, and poetic experiments, traveling through entangled histories of scientific discovery into the bottomless magic of the deep unknown.
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 9781911590859
Number of pages: 384
Dimensions: 234 x 153 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A breathtaking book, full of suspense, revelation, and beauty' - Sy Montgomery
'An exhilarating read... shiveringly exciting, important, and new' - Martin MacInnes
'The life work of an explorer-scientist becomes a thing of rich poetry' - Helen Gordon
'An impressionistic work of art depicting one of the greatest moments of discovery in human history... tantalizing glimpses of deep-sea life' - Edith Widder
'A genre-deying book about oceans that is imbued with intelligence, curiosity and wonder' - Joanna Pocock
'A brilliant work of literary art... a time-bending, gem-laden constellation' - Wayne Koestenbaum
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