Beneath the North Atlantic [Hardcover]

Jonathan Bird (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1997

Beneath the North Atlantic is one of the first books to explore the North Atlantic Ocean. Because the North Atlantic is comparatively cold and dark, few photographers venture there. But the North Atlantic throngs with life that is colorful and rarely seen.

This new book pictures many unique North Atlantic creatures. It also offers fascinating descriptions of these animals and how they live. Fished nearly to exhaustion and widely used as a dumping ground, the North Atlantic can again be a rich and renewable resource for the future if we manage its resources intelligently. Beneath the North Atlantic brings a new understanding of the extraordinary range of life beneath the sea and its importance to the future.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Authored by the president of Oceanic Research Group, a nonprofit organization devoted to environmental education, this attractive introduction to the marine biology of the North Atlantic is approximately one-third text and two-thirds beautiful color photos. Chapters cover plankton, porifera, cnidarians, mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, urochordates, nektonic invertebrates, fishes, and marine mammals, describing habitat and the size and behavior of some of the orders and classes of each phylum. Information on Latin for taxonomy is provided, but a chart of phyla, orders, and classes would have been useful. This volume includes more factual information on marine biology and less technical information on diving and underwater photography than Norbert Wu's Splendor of the Seas (LJ 11/1/94). An attractive addition to general collections, especially those serving young people contemplating a career in marine biology.?Judith Barnett, Pelle Marine Science Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Kingston
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"...Far from being a cold and barren sea, the North Atlantic is rich in marine life ranging from plankton to marine mammals. In this excellent book, the author's fascinating text describes the biology and behaviour of a selection of this marine life, staring with the Plankton, and moving through the various others groups such as Porifera, Cnidarians, Mollusks, and Echinoderms, to finish with the large animals. The text, however, is but an accompaniment to a series of striking and outstanding colour photographs which I would rang as among the best of marine life that I have seen in any book. This book will appeal to all with an interest in marine biology and is worth its price for the pictures alone." -- Countryside, The National Magazine for Wildlife [Great Britain], June/July 1997

"This book explores the marine life of the Atlantic coast of America in excellent colour photographs and text. The book is a coffee-table introduction to the cold Atlantic waters rather than a comprehensive identification guide and academic text. However, there are lots of interesting snippets of information, including the introductory page on Latin and Greek names, with some notes on pronunciation. The Glossary is not comprehensive, but has many inclusions that are left out of popular books, and is all the more interesting because of this. -- Glaucus, The Journal of the British Marine Life Study Society, Vernal/Summer, 1997

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Tide-Mark Press (February 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559493143
• ISBN-13: 978-1559493147
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 9.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,147,376 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Gorgious Photography, Interesting Text, & Weak Indexing, November 17, 2002

By 

John DeRoo (Hopkinton, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beneath the North Atlantic (Hardcover)

This coffee table book has stunning photography and descriptions of the creatures you might find while diving in the Gulf of Maine. I use it to show non-divers what I see when I go diving in Massachusetts, but I rarely come across specimens as beautiful as the pictures in the book. The descriptions often have both a lot of detail, such as typical measurements of the creatures, where they are found, coloration, etc., and anecdotal information, such as how the author's dive buddy was chased by a 20 lb. lobster with claws as big as his head.

The chapters are sequenced in a taxonomic order, starting with the Plankton and going "up" through the phyla of sponges, jellyfish, mollusks, etc., with fish and marine mammals at the "top". This structure, while common in underwater creature ID books, is not particularly obvious to the casual reader (i.e., someone who is not a marine biology geek). The chapter names, which are sometimes the Latin phylum name (e.g., Echinoderms) and sometimes the common name (e.g., Sponges) won't help Aunt Martha find "that round green thing with the pointy spikes", and even if she remembered that it was called a "sea urchin" she couldn't find it in the index. That is the glaring weakness of this book: it is hard to look up something in particular unless you already know where to look, and even then the sub-headings aren't in the table of contents and aren't always indexed (Sea Urchins are described under the section sub-heading Echinoids, which are a type of Echinoderm).

So, Aunt Martha will just have to flip through the book to find the sea urchins, and that reveals the glaring strength of the book: excellent photography that makes searching through the pages enjoyable.

Don't get this book as a reference book of North Atlantic marine life; do get it as coffee table book to browse through and to show others what is "down there".