Into The Planet is a hugely enjoyable, inspiring, and thrilling self-exploration of the life of Jill Heinerth, one of the world’s greatest living explorers. This isn’t a book just for scuba divers though, it’s a story that will resonate and envelope anyone interested in adventure ... After a captivating introduction, an unexpected and chilling home invasion gets pages turning quickly. The lure of underwater caves brings things back to a more relaxing pace, before an incident in rural Mexico has you reading faster than ever. The book finishes with a nail biting (and world’s first), cave dive inside an iceberg. Clive Cussler couldn’t think this stuff up! ... Where Into The Planet really shines is its ability to make you hold up a mirror to yourself. Maybe it makes you question your diving practices, maybe your life choices. It provokes inner thinkings that will linger long after you finish reading ... It is a book that once finished, will make you grab your shoes and head out the door eager to embark upon your own adventure. It empowers with the basic premise that anyone can be an explorer.
The opening pages are full of tension, adventure, and survival. They set the tone perfectly for what is a superb, honest, incredibly engaging book about Heinerth's life as a one of the world's top cave divers ... The writing in Into the Planet is immersive — Heinerth walks a fine line between chronicling the stunning beauty of some of the most exotic locales in the world and the somber realities of her work — like the incredible amount of training and effort that goes into it. She is also honest about the dangers of her chosen profession ... Heinerth takes readers along on an amazing journey...The journey isn't easy, but the author does a fantastic job of relating everything with ease and using a clear, straightforward prose that makes the book feel more like a conversation with a friend than a biography ... offers a very complete, nuanced look at cave diving and everything it entails ... a hybrid book that gives readers a lot of that while also being a captivating biography and a love letter to a sport where any small mistake can result in death — and any perfect dive can mean an amazing discovery.
...the journeys [Heinerth] describes...make for exciting, edge-of-your-seat reading. Not only is Heinerth’s memoir thoughtfully structured and adrenaline-filled, but it also offers a fascinating account of exactly how one becomes a renowned, record-setting adventurer ... There’s never a dull moment in Into the Planet, which bursts with full-throttle exuberance for the highs, and sometimes even the lows, of being a pioneering, modern-day explorer.
... an adventure memoir, love story and harrowing salute to those who have perished in underwater caves ... Ms. Heinerth is very good at making you understand both the otherworldly euphoria and claustrophobic horror of cave diving. She’s a solid writer, as adept at rendering the decor of her grubby student apartment in Toronto as she is at describing what it’s like to be trapped in a current inside an Antarctic iceberg 130 feet below the surface ... Ms. Heinerth takes careful notice not just of the psychological burdens of cave diving but of the physical ones as well.
Underwater explorer and documentary filmmaker Heinerth vividly depicts the extraordinary aquatic vistas she’s discovered in this immersive memoir ... Throughout, Heinerth powerfully recreates the exhilaration of staking out 'the longest underwater cave system in the world,' in the Yucatan, and living with the fear of equipment malfunctions and the constant threat of death. Heinert’s well-paced, informative memoir provides a thrill ride into unfamiliar worlds.
Heinerth...an award-winning Canadian filmmaker and professional cave diver, delivers an exhilarating, deeply personal memoir about her career as a woman in a male-dominated profession. In spare, crisp prose, she chronicles a 'life immersed in a relationship with this element that nourishes and destroys, buoys and drowns—that has both freed me and taken the lives of my friends' ... Told with sensitivity and joyful enthusiasm, this is an inspiring story that will appeal to many, especially adventurous young women.