This Watery World: Humans and the Sea

In this wonderfully wide-ranging volume, Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra have given us a fine collection of maritime riches. From reflections on the ocean as metaphor to shark documentaries and Jaws, from Hemingwayâs organic ecology to Melvilleâs tropic-birds and the establishment of a Puerto Rican maritime preserve, This Watery World reminds us thatâonshore and inlandâwe are all in the grip of our images and interactions with the sea. When I put this book down I was reminded of the Hyderabadi poet Sarojini Naidu: âThe sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all.❠âProfessor Ashton Nichols, editor of Romantic Natural Histories and author of The Poetics of Epiphany and The Revolutionary âIâ