As I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently reading the recently published “A Tidal Odyssey; Ed Ricketts and the Making of Between Pacific Tides” for an upcoming review, as well as devoting still more to refreshing my memories of “Between Pacific Tides” itself, I was delighted to receive a new book from University of Chicago Press that takes up a very much related theme but in in a remarkably different way.
“Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?”
As one raised on the north Oregon coast in a family with deep and long-standing ties to the fishing industry, and still living within a relatively short drive from it, I am perhaps a bit more aware of marine affairs than the average person. So not surprisingly, when a copy of Professor C. Drew Harvell’s “Ocean Outbreak; Confronting the Rising Tide of Marine Disease” arrived from University of California Press, you can believe that my interest was immediately piqued.
As one who grew up on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, I am rather fond of the planets seas and all the wonders they contain. I’ve also spent a bit of time near the Atlantic Ocean, had some fleeting encounters with the Indian Ocean, and seen the Arctic Ocean from the windows of many a jet airplane. However when it comes to the Southern Ocean, I am absolutely without a star to steer by – and so are, according to the preview of Joy McCann’s forthcoming book “Wild Sea; A History of the Southern Ocean,” most others as well.