Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves - Softcover

James Nestor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781250650 ISBN 13: 9781781250655

Publisher: British Books for Managers (BBM), 2014

Synopsis

Covering a diving championship in Greece on a hot and sticky assignment for Outside magazine, James Nestor discovered free diving. He had stumbled on one of the most extreme sports in existence: a quest to extend the frontiers of human experience, in which divers descend without breathing equipment, for hundreds of feet below the water, for minutes after they should have died from lack of oxygen. Sometimes they emerge unconscious, or bleeding from the nose and ears, and sometimes they don't come up at all.

The free divers were Nestor's way into an exhilarating and dangerous world of deep-sea pioneers, underwater athletes, scientists, spear fishermen, billionaires and ordinary men and women who are poised on the brink of some amazing discoveries about the ocean. Soon he was visiting the scientists who live 60ft underwater (and are permanently high on nitrous dioxide), swimming with the notorious man-eating sharks of Réunion and descending thousands of feet in a homemade submarine. And on the way down, he learnt about the amazing amphibious reflexes activated in the human body under deep-water conditions, why dolphins were injected with LSD in an attempt to teach them to talk, and why sharks like AC/DC.

The sea covers seventy per cent of Earth's surface, and still contains answers to questions about the world we are only beginning to ask: Deep blends science and adventure to uncover its amazing secrets.

About this title

Review:

A fascinating, informative, exhilarating book. (Wall Street Journal 2014-07-14)

Idiosyncratic and Illuminating... Deep demonstrates that a rich, life-filled, mysterious realm of vast possibility is contained in that blackness. It will certainly enrich the thinking of anyone planning to spend time at the beach. (Horatio Clare The Independent 2014-07-26)

Deep is a heartfelt, eccentric and pleasantly eccentric guide to the planet's most mysterious region. It should encourage plenty of readers to take the plunge. (Sunday Business Post 2014-07-27)

Engaging and eye-popping. (Esquire 2014-06-02)

Book Description:

Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea meets Born to Run and the cutting edge of popular science

About this edition

• Publisher: British Books for Managers (BBM)
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1781250650
• ISBN 13: 9781781250655
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280