THE BATHYSPHERE BOOK BY BRAD FOX

A wide ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep sea exploration and its afterlives,The Bathysphere Bookbegins 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 telephonereceiver pressed to her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feetinto the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called thebathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world,was Hollisters colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseencreatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.

From this momentous first encounter with the unknown depths,The Bathysphere Bookwidens 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 divesfrom groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.

The Bathysphere Bookis a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with over fifty 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.

HARDBACK BOOK