I have just completed
reading half of Deep: Freediving,
renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves by James
Nestor. If I had to describe this book
in one word, I would say it is phenomenal.
Everything about this book, from the writing style to the content to the
anecdotes to the pictures (I’ll get into later) is so amazing. This book is about the sport of
freediving. James Nestor is a reporter
who was supposed to cover the freediving world championships in 2011. He then got hooked on the idea of freediving
and decided to pursue this sport.
However, he soon found out that he hated competitive freediving. It is too egotistical, he says, and
eliminated any love for the ocean, which is how freediving started. Nestor was much more interested in the idea
of freediving as a meditative activity, and the great research about marine
life that can come as a result of freediving.
He writes:
After
the horrors of Nitsch’s dive in Santorini, David King’s near drowning, and
Michael Risian almost getting lost at sea, I swore off watching any more
competitive freediving. Sure, the human
body could dive deeper than scientists thought possible, but it also had
limits. We all saw those limits. And I had gotten tired of seeing the bloody
and blue faces of those who went beyond them.
In freediving, the ego is a deadly
goad. It’s also something of a
blinder. Most of the competitive divers
I met seemed to have little interest in exploring the deep ocean that they had
painstakingly trained their bodies to enter.
They dived with their eyes closed; nitrogen narcosis struck them dumb;
they forgot where they were and why they were there. The deepest divers lolled themselves into a
catatonic state that removed any
sense of actually being in the water. The
aim: Hitting a number on a rope. Beating
your opponent. Winning a medal. Bragging rights.
Yes, they were swimming where no human had
before. But this struck me as maddening,
like an explorer arriving in previously undiscovered wilderness and focusing
only on his GPS coordinates (Nestor 88).
The
writing style of Nestor is very engaging, in my opinion. He uses somewhat casual language, and does
not let the jargon of the freediving world confuse the reader. At the same time, he does not dumb down all
of the information so that it no longer has scientific value. Nestor uses narrative a lot in this
book. He uses anecdotes about his experiences
with the freediving community to convey his point. His anecdotes are interesting and very fun to
read, in part because of his great use of metaphorical language. His simile in the final paragraph of the
passage above was brilliant. It truly
demonstrated the idea that Nestor wanted to convey in a clear manner. It relates his struggle with freediving to
something much less alien that all readers will be able to comprehend.
Another aspect of this book that I love is the pictures. No, this is not a picture book, but rather a
book with pictures. In around the middle
of the book, there is a series of 12 pictures that encapsulates the ideas of
the book. I think this is an extremely
important aspect of the book because it gives an image to the stories that
Nestor tells. Most of what Nestor talks
about is foreign to readers, so these pictures make the concepts much more down
to earth and believable. This appeals to
both the ethos because it proves existence of some creatures and logos because
it provides concrete, legitimate pictures of the ideas Nestor explores.
I’m only half way in to the book, but I surely recommend it
to any reader.
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