On Blue Machine

This one, sadly, took me forever to get into. I’d had high hopes: Helen Czerski is an outstanding science communicator, and the ocean is a subject I find fascinating. The trouble is that the book never quite decided what it wanted to be. It ends up a survey of the ocean’s various aspects without cohering into a single work — a sharp contrast to how it presents itself at the outset, as the ocean as a system that feeds the earth’s many processes.

That the ocean is a system is the important point, and it’s central to all life on earth: most of the sunlight the planet receives is absorbed by the seas and becomes heat, and between the tides (from the moon) and temperature, that energy is translated into currents and waves, which then feed the earth’s climatic cycles. There are separate chapters on light and sound in the sea, on marine creatures, and more, and individually the topics are genuinely interesting — I learned a fair amount. The weakness is that the chapters feel disconnected. Had they been drawn together around that larger argument, the book would have been far stronger.