BOOKREVIEWS Discovering Submerged Stories
Shark: An Illustrated Biography
BOOKREVIEWS Discovering Submerged Stories
By Duncan Ross Dived Up Publications COST: £ 25 ISBN 978-1-909455-64-1
Hats off to Duncan Ross, who has turned a personal predilection for amateur archaeology into a wide-ranging project, and one which shows no sign of slowing down. Duncan may not be a professional marine archaeologist, but he straddles the worlds of archaeology and recreational diving with unbridled enthusiasm. This is his story, a personal narrative into which he weaves the stories of the sites he has explored and surveyed cross the UK.
Although only six at the time, he was first inspired by media of the raising of the Mary Rose from the Solent in 1982. Such early impressions were consolidated by the discovery of the Titanic, 2.5 miles down in the mid-Atlantic. Today, there are various groups devoted to amateur marine archaeology, but there has never been another initiative to unite the worlds of recreational diving and marine archaeology on the scale of the Mary Rose project.
For this, his first book, Duncan has cherrypicked various sites around the country to dive them and get an idea of what’ s down there. The narrative focusses on 11 sites, representing the author’ s journey thus far. Some of them will be familiar to casual readers, such as the Second World War Tanks and Bulldozers of the Solent, or the protosubmarine Resurgam II, which lies off Rhyl in Liverpool Bay. Others are more obscure, but perhaps that’ s where you will find the real interest in Duncan’ s journey, as he investigates the First World War casualty SS Leysian off the Pembrokeshire coast; or the Mesolithic scenery of Bouldnor Cliff off the Isle of Wight.
There’ s a lot of detail along the way, but it does beg the question – does one person’ s journey into 11 historic sites justify a 276-page book? Perhaps it’ s a matter of perspective. I find Duncan an engaging character; here, he provides a template for how citizen archaeologists can flourish in the current polarized scene of‘ professionals’ and‘ amateurs’. To this end, the chapters on skill progression and how to get involved are helpful to those seeking inspiration. SR
Shark: An Illustrated Biography
By Daniel Abel and Sophie A Maycock
Princeton University Press
COST: £ 25 ISBN 978-0-691-26167-6
Books about sharks abound, as the authors acknowledge in their preface. So if you want to write a book that stands out from the toothsome crowd, you have to do something different.
When I first started diving, the most popular shark book was a bloodthirsty affair with ghoulish photos of bite wounds and a jarring chapter on which sharks made for good eating.
Since then, we’ ve had a wave of revisionist shark books painting sharks in a less maligned light, many of them aimed at younger readers. This is something new, authors with extremely strong scientific backgrounds taking a more idiosyncratic approach. This book sheds life on the world of sharks by telling the life stories
of four of the better studied species – the great white, the sandbar, the smallspotted catshark and the spiny dogfish.
These four species are used as a lens to focus on the lives of sharks, their role in nature and their intersection with the human world. While much of what applies to these sharks can be said of other species, they are each unique in several respects, and this beautifully written‘ biography’ affords an up-to-date insight into their lives.
Couple scientific savvy with the elegant watercolour illustrations, and you have a refined and enjoyable book, recommended for shark aficionados. SR
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