Description:
Long before popular science, there were myths and tales of wonder. Long before there were museums, there were cabinets of curiosities. A new, unashamedly populist generation of TV documentaries isn't afraid to appeal to our fascination with thrilling tales and creepy anecdotes as it outlines what we know of the workings of our world. Some of these programs are sensationalist and lazy. Others do science the greatest of favors by conveying just how little we really understand of our planet and how much more magical it seems as we get to know it. The trilogy of PBS documentaries that began with Savage Earth and Savage Skies concludes with Savage Seas. The book has the same philosophy as the series--to add a human dimension to natural phenomena, like floods and fogs and tides, by comparing the way we have understood and handled them in the past with the ways we contend with them today. We see how spectacular and dangerous phenomena--giant squids, tsunamis, the sinking of the Titanic--relate to the big picture of climate, currents, and sea habitats. There is much still undiscovered. Rarely visited and effectively uninhabited, the two-thirds of our planet covered by seas contains many mysteries. This book barely scratches the surface, but it scratches in all the right places. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk
| 
