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.
