Journalist Hellwarth chronicles American efforts to create an underwater habitat that would open the ocean's depths to exploration, at the same time that astronauts were racing to the moon.
In 1959, Navy doctor George Bond, was given the project to train and equip seamen to escape from damaged submarines while avoiding the bends, the often-fatal arterial gas embolisms caused by rapid decompression of air as a diver rapidly surfaces. Bond envisaged expanding the program beyond rescue missions to encompass a wide range of underwater activities—scientific and industrial as well as military. He anticipated President Kennedy, who in 1961 proposed a major underwater exploration program as a matter of absolute necessity to the national interest, to the cost of $2 billion over the next decade. “Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it,” said the president. This resulted in the creation of the Sealab program, which Bond was chosen to lead. Not only were the space and underwater exploration programs contemporaneous, but they shared key personnel such as Malcolm Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit the earth who also led a Sealab II team that lived underwater successfully for 30 days. “Never had so many people lived and worked for so long at such depths…a grand total of three and a half man-years living on the bottom,” writes the author. Unfortunately, the Sealab III mission was prematurely aborted after developing a serious leak, and that aspect of the program ended—although offshoots from it (many of which are still top secret) continued, including tapping submerged Soviet communications cables. Another offshoot was the development of technology necessary for off-shore drilling of oil and gas. Intriguing account of a relatively unknown program for undersea exploration.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7432-4745-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Weisman quietly unfolds his sobering cautionary tale, allowing us to conclude what we may about the balancing act that...
Nicely textured account of what the Earth would look like if humans disappeared.
Disaster movies have depicted the State of Liberty poking out from the ground and empty cities overgrown with trees and vines, but what would really happen if, for one reason or another, every single one of us vanished from the planet? Building on a Discover magazine article, Weisman (Journalism/Univ. of Arizona; An Echo in My Blood, 1999, etc.) addresses the question. There are no shocks here—nature goes on. But it is unsettling to observe the processes. Drawing on interviews with architects, biologists, engineers, physicists, wildlife managers, archaeologists, extinction experts and many others willing to conjecture, Weisman shows how underground water would destroy city streets, lightning would set fires, moisture and animals would turn temperate-zone suburbs into forests in 500 years and 441 nuclear plants would overheat and burn or melt. “Watch, and maybe learn,” writes the author. Many of his lessons come from past developments, such as the sudden disappearance of the Maya 1,600 years ago and the evolution of animals and humans in Africa. Bridges will fall, subways near fault lines in New York and San Francisco will cave in, glaciers will wipe away much of the built world and scavengers will clean our human bones within a few months. Yet some things will persist after we’re gone: bronze sculptures, Mount Rushmore (about 7.2 millions years, given granite’s erosion rate of one inch every 10,000 years), particles of everything made of plastic, manmade underground malls in Montreal and Moscow. In Hawaii, lacking predators, cows and pigs will rule.
Weisman quietly unfolds his sobering cautionary tale, allowing us to conclude what we may about the balancing act that nature and humans need to maintain to survive.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-34729-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
PERSPECTIVES
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.
An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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