Splendid coffee table book, conversation starter, and learning tool

The Deed | The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss | Claire Nouvian

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	• The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss Claire Nouvian University Of Chicago Press, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Captivating coffee table book

A fantastic introduction to deep sea creatures. The photographs are amazingly clear and stunning. Guests in my house were captivated with every page.

Splendid coffee table book, conversation starter, and learning tool

I just love this book! The photos are spectacular, and the paper stock is very high quality, doing the material justice. Not only has the book started a conversation every time I have people over, it's also sparked a 6 year old's imagination. Now we watch anything we can about the ocean on Discovery/NatGeo, and she wants to be a marine biologist. I can't recommend this book enough if you are an avid 'learner' and curious about our last, undiscovered inner space.

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The Deed

Awesome photography, such an interesting subject! We really do need to explore the very depths of our planet, there is so much we don't know. This book is just a wonderful coffee table and discussion book!

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Spectacular Pictures from an Unseen Realm

We say "Out of sight, out of mind" and to our cost we believe it and live it. The creatures of the deep sea could have been nothing but out of sight for centuries; even when we had started to think about the life deep in the oceans, the scientific dictum in the nineteenth century was that in the depths there was no light, no oxygen, and no foodstuffs, so there was no life. Deep-sea trawling seemed to bring up tentative evidence that maybe there were some creatures that eked out a living down there, but it was not until the twentieth century that bathyspheres and other submersibles got an idea of just how lively the depths were. They are still out of sight for most of us, but a gorgeous picture book can cure that: _The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss_ (University of Chicago Press) by Claire Nouvian has astonishing portraits of alien creatures that would seem to spring from the minds of Hollywood special effects animators. (One of them pictured here is indeed supposed to be the inspiration for the monster in _Alien_.) We are familiar in our own terrestrial realm of how evolution has crammed plant and animal life into every available niche; it has happened as well in the seas, and it has happened all the way down.

Nouvian is a journalist and film director, and for this volume has gotten short explanatory chapters from biologists who are experts in, say, hydrothermal vents or the polar depths. These stand as good explanations for the photographs, which in this big, glossy book are the real show. There are nightmare creatures here, like the black-devil anglerfish, with needle-like teeth in a gaping, frowning mouth and flabby and wrinkled skin, with a little lighted antenna above her head. The anglerfish has an extraordinary means of reproduction; the female is much larger than the male, and when he finds her, he attaches to her and becomes smaller still, gradually dissolving his tissues into hers and becoming her internal repository for sperm. Vampyroteuthis infernalis_, literally "the vampire squid from hell", has several photographs here, and rightly so. The blood-red skin of this creature and its strange appearance like an umbrella with teeth (they are actually fleshy fingers) along its ribs made it appear infernal to the first observers, but it is as harmless and shy as any other octopus. Some creatures on the other hand are cute as can be. A little "Dumbo octopus" looks like a friendly creature from a PacMan game, yellow with little flaps instead of tentacles, fins that look like ears, and a siphon that looks like an extruded tongue. "They are often observed resting on the bottom," says the text accompanying the picture, "with their mantle spread around them. What are they doing there, sitting so quietly in the dark? Nobody knows." The yeti crab, discovered in 2005, caused a media sensation; it is ghost white and has hairy legs and claws, and inspired a stuffed animal in its image in Japan one week after its discovery was announced. Many of the jellyfish here look like flying saucers descending. The appearance of the Pigbutt worm needs no more description than its name. There is a siphonophore which is like a long columnar jellyfish in a spiral, but the thousands of tentacles are not only toxic to prey, but bioluminescent, so that its photo looks like a firework. The ping-pong tree sponge looks like a sixties lighting fixture, each branch radiating from a central core and ending in a perfect sphere. They are all strange, and the word to describe them might be otherworldly, but they only look that way. They are as much part of our living world as we are, and especially as new discoveries we must value them. There are threats from pollution, global warming, and deepwater trawling, and if we are not careful, the creatures we are seeing for the first time won't be there to see at all. This beautiful book with one surprising picture after another gives colorful tour of an essential yet mysterious natural realm.

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A book of Wonder

The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss is an amazing book. The images are exquisite, some are nearly unbelievable. The writing is crisp, not the lead weight or gushing prose of nature books. The book reveals the wonders of the sea floor. My favorite character in the book is Grimpoteuthis aka Dumbo Octopus. Once you start the book you will not be able to put it down. Nouvian and University of Chicago Press deserves our thanks for producing a brilliantly designed graphic book.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11, 12, 13

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