The Bathysphere Book

Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths

By: Brad Fox

Narrated by: Lee Osorio

Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

"Mesmerizing.... Original and often profound, [The Bathysphere Book] is a moving testament to the wonders of exploration." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

"Imbued with the adventurous spirit of science and exploration...[The Bathysphere Book is] an enchanting cabinet of curiosities." (Kirkus Reviews)

A wide-ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep-sea exploration and its afterlives, The Bathysphere Book begins with the first ever voyage to the deep ocean in 1930 and expands to explore the adventures and entanglements of its all-too-human participants at a time when the world still felt entirely new.

In the summer of 1930, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feet into the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseen creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.

From this momentous first encounter with the unknown depths, The Bathysphere Book widens its scope to explore a transforming and deeply paradoxical America, as the first great skyscrapers rose above New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. In prose that is magical, atmospheric, and entirely engrossing, Brad Fox dramatizes new visions of our planetary home, delighting in tales of the colorful characters who surrounded, supported, and participated in the dives—from groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.

The Bathysphere Book is a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with more than 50 full-color images, records from the original bathysphere logbooks, and the moving story of surreptitious romance between Beebe and Hollister that anchors their exploration. Brad Fox blurs the line between poetry and research, unearthing and rendering a visionary meeting with the unknown.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Brad Fox (P)2023 Audible, Inc.

Psychobabble

I was seduced into buying this book and spending nearly seven hours listening to it by a positive review. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy this book, but, if you do, know what it's about.

There is surprisingly little in here about William Beebe's dives in the bathysphere in the early 1930s. When the book sticks to that subject, it is not bad. But there just was not enough in that subject, at least for this author, for a book of any respectable length.

So what does Fox do? He engages in a series of lengthy digressions and diversions into the minds of Beebe and others, purporting to know what they were thinking and feeling, and then engages in lengthy discussions of largely tangential events. I would guess this makes up about 75 percent of the book. The book reads as though the author (or the reader) is on a psychodelic, or, at the very least, in a strange dream.

The narration is not terrible, but the narrator has a somewhat cloying voice--probably well suited for this nonsense--that grated on me after a short time.

I would put this book in the category of loose historical fiction or, if it could be a category, "non-fiction based fantasy." For more linear thinkers, it would probably qualify as what a departed friend (and engineer and one of the smartest and most well read persons I have known) would call "bull...t, shaken, not stirred."