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 Hemingway's organic ecology to Melville's tropic-birds and the establishment of a Puerto Rican maritime preserve, 'This Watery World' reminds us that - onshore and inland - we 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: 'The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all' - Professor Ashton Nichols, editor of 'Romantic Natural Histories' and author of 'The Poetics of Epiphany' and 'The Revolutionary 'I''.