Imagine World War II—with frequent chemical warfare attacks on cities and battlefields. Before and during World War II, laypeople and leaders held the widespread conviction that poison gas would be used in the next big war more destructively than in World War I. Churchill considered using gas if Germany invaded Britain. Roosevelt promised retaliation if the Axis used gas. Canada tested gas in Alberta’s fields. Fear and preparation for gas attacks permeated multiple countries, from laypeople to the top, from civilians to the military, but few talk about it. This is a hidden story of World War II, but one worth knowing. Just the threat of gas influenced the conflict.
What an eye-opening biography! Mary Sears never left the United States, but she was a key reason the World War II Pacific invasions were successful. This book does not take away from the sacrifices of the fighters or the hard strategic decisions and leadership of the commanders. It does show what science, combined with traditional fieldwork and creative library research, can do to design maps and provide information about tides, ocean depths, and coral reefs, thus enabling men, ships, and equipment to attack Japanese-held islands effectively.
This book is also an homage to teamwork by people, especially women and academics in the 1940s, who didn’t always receive a lot of respect from the military at the start of the war yet found themselves relied upon repeatedly for their top-secret work.
"Magnificently researched, brilliantly written, Lethal Tides is immensely entertaining and reads like an action novel. Catherine Musemeche has brought to life the incredible work of the scientists and researchers who made such a remarkable contribution to America's war effort in the Pacific theater during WWII." -Admiral William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy, Ret.), #1 New York Times bestselling author of Make Your Bed and The Hero Code
Lethal Tides tells the story of the virtually unknown Mary Sears, "the first oceanographer of the Navy," whose groundbreaking oceanographic research led the U.S. to victory in the Pacific theater during World War II.…
I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
I was delighted to discover this short, sweet, sciency book about the ocean.
Written in rhyme and framed by the reassuring phrase “the sea knows,” this book is ideal for the youngest readers. Many of the concepts and creatures presented are opposites. For example, “the sea knows huge,” one blue whale, is paired with “the sea knows small,” a multitude of tiny krill.
The watery world comes to life in bright, colorful illustrations that are cleverly composed to help kiddos understand the concepts introduced in the text. The back of the book is filled with facts about the plants and animals featured in the story.
Dive in and explore the wonders of the ocean and its inhabitants in this lyrical, fact-filled ode to the sea! This beautifully illustrated picture book features extensive nonfiction backmatter for further exploration.
We are young. The sea is old. The sea has secrets to unfold. The sea knows.
In this playful, rhyming celebration of the marine world, readers can explore all of the wondrous things the sea knows. It knows huge whales and small krill; it knows short crabs and tall giant kelp; it knows brightly colored starfish in shallow pools; and in the inky depths it knows the alluring…
The ocean has always been a sacred place to me, full of wondrous adventures and knowledge. I grew up in the Hawaiian islands with many hours frolicking in the waves, and swinging from the vines of nearshore banyan trees. One of my favorite books as a child was Treasure Island, anchored by the quest for Flint’s treasure map. Ironically, the details of that map are never revealed in the book. But I grew up to become a mapper of the ocean, making with my colleagues at Esri, a host of digital maps that reveal treasures of scientific insight. May the books on my list become treasures for you, too.
Even as an oceanographer myself, I was transfixed and transported by this book. And I loved hearing about the author’s own explorations to the deep. I love the pieces of deepsea exploration history that are in this book; that blew me away, even as someone who has contributed to exploration myself!
I loved the plotlines better than any movie or TV drama, for sure! And not only is the prose thrilling, ethereal, and beautiful, but it has helped me to renew my strength, as a foot soldier in the environmental call to action that is a huge part of this story.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From bestselling author Susan Casey, an awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets
“An irresistible mix of splendid scholarship, heart-stopping adventure writing, and vivid, visceral prose." —Sy Montgomery, New York Times best-selling author of The Soul of an Octopus
For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of…
As a planetary scientist and college professor, I love the adventure of finding something new, the wonder of strange worlds, and the magic of mysterious discoveries that behave logically in a way that I can figure out. Unsurprisingly, that is what I like in my fiction too. I also love a story that explores the nature of the interaction between people, particularly in friendship or romance (all proper of course—I’m an old-fashioned guy). The books on this list are all touchstones in my own journey into science and life, and I hope that you can find in them the delight, wonder, insight, and motivation that I have found.
High school student Kip Morgan wins an internship at an oceanographic institute in Hawaii where he, with help of new friend Julie Scott, overcomes multiple personal and engineering challenges to solve an archaeological mystery and raise a sunken ship from the sea floor. This story from the 1970s was key in guiding me toward a life of science, and the portrayal of a realistic, mentored research experience gave me a vision for what I might do in my own journey through college and into science.
I loved the exotic location, scuba diving, and seafloor exploration, mystery, adventure, and romance!
I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths.
The title Neptune’s Laboratory invokes knowledge of the oceans through science alongside the equally central role imagination has played in the human relationship with the sea. Antony Adler astutely observes how its mirror-like qualities encouraged scientists, politicians, and the public since the early 19th century to use the ocean to spin utopian fantasies and explore dystopian fears. Most importantly, he reminds readers that our propensity to fathom oceans to project the fate of the human species and our planet offers an important key: imagination could chart a course toward a better future.
An eyewitness to profound change affecting marine environments on the Newfoundland coast, Antony Adler argues that the history of our relationship with the ocean lies as much in what we imagine as in what we discover.
We have long been fascinated with the oceans, seeking "to pierce the profundity" of their depths. In studying the history of marine science, we also learn about ourselves. Neptune's Laboratory explores the ways in which scientists, politicians, and the public have invoked ocean environments in imagining the fate of humanity and of the planet-conjuring ideal-world fantasies alongside fears of our species' weakness and ultimate…
My wife suggested we try scuba diving while on holiday in Grand Cayman. We were already falling in love with the island, and the incredible experience underwater opened a whole new world to us. From that moment on, our yearly travels changed completely. Our destination choices were now based upon diving opportunities. That was twenty years ago. Today, I’m a certified divemaster with dives all over the US (including Hawaii), the Caribbean (including Cuba), Australia, and even Iceland. Throw in my sense of adventure as a former race car driver, motorcycle rider, and outdoor adventurer, and I had plenty of personal experiences to create the AJ Bailey series.
Okay, so Deep isn’t specifically about women, or scuba diving – it tackles freediving – but includes females and anyone who loves diving in any form should read this book. The meticulous research into the physiology and psychology of human beings underwater is simply fascinating. Nestor ventures off into all kinds of territory, from octopus intelligence; to whales conversing; to humans holding a single breath for an inhuman amount of time.
Freediving is the common theme in the book, but it is far more than that. This is an in-depth study of life beneath the waves from an intriguing perspective.
From the author of the international Bestseller Breath
Covering a diving championship in Greece on a hot and sticky assignment for Outside magazine, James Nestor discovered free diving. He had stumbled on one of the most extreme sports in existence: a quest to extend the frontiers of human experience, in which divers descend without breathing equipment, for hundreds of feet below the water, for minutes after they should have died from lack of oxygen. Sometimes they emerge unconscious, or bleeding from the nose and ears, and sometimes they don't come up at all.
Dr. Helen Scales a marine biologist, broadcaster and bestselling writer whose books include Spirals in Time and Eye of the Shoal. Her stories about the ocean appear in National Geographic Magazine, The Guardian, New Scientist, and others. Helen co-hosts the Catch Our Drift podcast, teaches at Cambridge University and is a scientific advisor to the marine conservation charity Sea Changers. She divides her time between Cambridge, England, and the wild French coast of Finistère.
Eugenie Clark wrote this book about the early days of her amazing career as a marine biologist and shark specialist (she was later nicknamed the ‘Shark Lady’). In the 1940s, not only was she unusual for being a female scientist, but she set off on intrepid journeys around the world, studying fish around tiny islands across the Pacific and in the Red Sea, long before it was developed as a tourist destination. This book gives a glorious view of a pioneering scientist and what ocean science used to be like. I was lucky enough to meet her a few years before she died in her nineties. She was incredibly warm and generous, and was clearly still driven by the same boundless curiosity and adventurous spirit that you will see written across the pages of her book.
Eugenie Clark, who received her Ph.D. in 1951, was one of the first women to do independent field work in ichthyology. In this youthful memoir, she describes her childhood excursions to Manhattan's old Aquarium, and the development of her education and her career specialty - plectognaths, the family that includes the blowfish, puffer, triggerfish, and other (sometimes poisonous) varieties. "Delightful autobiography." - Christian Science Monitor.
Besides being an avid sketchbook keeper, author, and illustrator, I also collect weird and random facts. In my Everything Awesome book series, I love discovering cool facts to share with readers about some of my favorite topics, including sharks, space, and dinosaurs.
It’s a little unbelievable to think how much we have learned about the ocean since Jacques Cousteau’s time, primarily because of his inventive spirit and incurable passion to share his explorations with the rest of us. How lucky are we?
Manfish is a great introduction to his many discoveries and life story for kids.
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Before Jacques Cousteau became an internationally known oceanographer and champion of the seas, he was a curious little boy. In this lovely biography, poetic text and gorgeous paintings combine to create a portrait of Jacques Cousteau that is as magical as it is inspiring.
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
Cli-fi is a well-established genre now, but this was one of the very first novels that dared to engage with climate change in a realistic way. As a reader, I was engrossed by the fully fleshed-out main character, Tina, a geochemist. Her professional life on board a research ship is so beautifully written that we can practically feel the spray of salt water on her skin.
Many women in science and other professions will relate to the problems she faces as she tries to balance her personal and professional lives.
At an oceanography institute in northern California, geochemist Tina Arenas studies climates of the distant geologic past. Heedless of life beyond her circle of scientists, Tina is immersed in a world of dinosaurs and shifting continents, where time is measured in ten-million-year spansbut when both her research and an extracurricular love affair take off in directions she has not anticipated, she is catapulted into the late twentieth century world of people and politics.
Set in the early 1980s, when the problem of global warming had yet to garner much public concern, Carbon Dreams tells the story of one scientist's struggle…
When I was fourteen, dismayed by high school (longing
to drop out), I managed to get Mononucleosis, or the kissing disease, it’s
sometimes called (for some reason). It gave me the chance to withdraw into my
bedroom and read and make notes. Didn’t venture out of my small room too much.
Two books sparked a dream of writing for a
lifetime. Thomas Mann’s The MagicMountain, and Rachel Carson’s The
Sea Around Us. One, a novel about breathing the brisk air of an Alpine rest-sanitorium,
experiencing life and ideas (I thought I was Hans Castorp); the other, a
book-length essay—immersing my spirit in waves, watery mysteries, the fecund
life of seas and currents, tides and sea-creatures. Looking back, I see one book
about aspiring and learning: the other, about contemplating the mothering seas
and their changeling depths.
This new edition of Carson’s trilogy unites
her non-fiction studies of…
