Savage Seas

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reading, incredible photographs!
Review: I found this book at a friend's house, while visiting the USA from Toronto, Canada. I read it in one evening, and now can't wait to watch the PBS 4-part special based on it. It has made me view the oceans in a whole new light.

Rating:
Summary: A stunning portrayal of our seas, in words and pictures.
Review: Most of us take for granted those forces of nature that are in play all around us. This book about our seas brings to our attention just how powerful and indifferent nature can be. It will grip you from the first sentence to the last, and that's not counting page after page of amazing photographs.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful photography, suffers from poor editing
Review: This book is a very informative and interesting discourse on the often capricious and always unpredictable oceans. The book is loaded with beautiful photography and some dramatic weather footage. Accounts of historical events are mostly well written. Unfortunately, this book suffers from editorial errors that might appear innocuous, but which begin to be very irritating after enduring two or three, and downright maddening after several. Case in point: the chapter about tsunamis addresses the Good Friday (Alaska, 1964) earthquake and subsequent tsunami. There is a reference to "the entire west coast of the United States from Vancouver to Denver". Well... last I checked, Vancouver is in Canada, unless one refers to the much smaller town in southern Washington. Worse, Denver is about as coastal as Los Angeles is inland. Further on, Crescent City, California is described as being in southern Oregon. True, this is not as bad a gaffe as referring to Denver as coastal, but nonetheless, such editorial errors destroy the readability of the book. Perhaps more grave, they serve to illustrate and compound Americans' well-documented lack of geographical aptitude. This is understandable in daily conversation, but wholly unacceptable in a publication striving to tackle a rather technical subject. There are too many similar errors to document here, and the book struggles with poor syntax and general editorial inefficiency.