Beautifully written and beautifully made, The Bathysphere Book is a piece of poetic nonfiction that strives to conjure up the crushing blackness of the midnight zone ... Reveling in scientific language that is descriptive to the point of inscrutability, Fox devotes chapters to oddities from the history of deep-sea exploration, which take on the surreal quality of the rhapsodic passages of Moby-Dick.
This is no straightforward narrative but a book built from scraps that belie its intricate engineering ... A kind of yearning dream, a tossing and turning in your bed in the night.
A weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing, history and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown ... Fox spent years poring over Beebe’s notebooks, and he brings to life the explorer’s boyish curiosity, sensitivity and flaws.
Mr. Fox... uses the naturalist’s experience of the depths to anchor his life story. It’s an unorthodox way to structure a book, but in Mr. Fox’s sure hands it works wonderfully ... More compelling than Grant’s odious race science are Beebe’s musings on the ocean depths, which Mr. Fox renders in lyrical and wry prose ... [Beebe's] His reflections from a half-mile down suffuse one of the most fascinating and unusual new books I’ve read in some time.
Some readers may be frustrated by Fox’s vaguely connected tangents and wish instead for a more linear history, but there’s a method to his pacing ... Fox seeks to not just tell Beebe’s story, but to embody his philosophy, and he explores the vast potential of storytelling and searches its depths for glimmers of life and connectivity.
