PositiveThe AtlanticGroundbreaking ... King adds a crucial missing piece to this oft-told history ... He elides important shifts in paradigms, such as that from classic conservationism to biocentric preservation and ecological restoration ... The book is also markedly light on self-examination.
Edith Widder
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... gripping ... Widder’s voice is in turns jaunty, precise and nerdily quippy. She occasionally resorts to cliché and her jokes don’t always land. But often the prose glints ... Where Widder unfortunately falls short is in the final pages of the book, where she briefly addresses environmental threats to the ocean. She hews to the old and, increasingly, outdated maxim that alarmism will cause the public to shut down rather than perk up. Given the pending cascade of catastrophes that climate change threatens to inflict on the oceans (perhaps nowhere more so than on the deep sea, which studies show will warm faster than the surface), her cheery contention that a combination of optimism, exploration and education will solve the ocean’s problems rings hollow.
Helen Scales
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... brave enough to risk a darker and, in some ways, more satisfying tone ... Scales’s conceit — of traveling aboard a research vessel for a couple of weeks in the Gulf of Mexico — feels a bit thin...She never physically ventures into the abyss ... Scales’s great gift is for transmuting our awe at the wonders of the deep sea into a kind of quiet rage that they could soon be no more.
