Subject Guides: Featured Ebooks: National Oceans Month

Welcome

Happy National Oceans Month! Here are a few ebooks to help you dive into the enchanting, mysterious, and remarkable stories surrounding the ocean and to promote awareness of marine conservation. Titles include classic or modern fiction and environmental nonfiction reads. Each ebook is guaranteed to keep you entertained, informed, and swimming back for more.

National Oceans Month

Watching Giants

Personal, anecdotal, and highly engaging, Watching Giants opens a window on a world that seems quite like our own, yet is so different that understanding it pushes the very limits of our senses. Elin Kelsey's colorful first-person account, drawing from her rich, often humorous, everyday experiences as a mother, a woman, and a scientist, takes us to the incredibly productive waters of the Gulf of California and beyond, to oceans around the world. Kelsey brings us along as she talks to leading cetacean researchers and marine ecologists about their intriguing discoveries. What emerges alongside these fascinating snapshots of whale culture is a dizzying sense of the tremendous speed with which we are changing the oceans' ecosystems--through overfishing, noise pollution, and even real estate development. Watching Giants introduces a world of immense interconnectivity and beauty--one that is now facing imminent peril.

Fishing, Gone?

Humans have a rapacious relationship with the world's ocean, extracting immeasurable quantities of its inhabitants and resources, while simultaneously depositing unbound sums of pollution into it. If we are to move toward sustainable practices, then we must first move toward ways of thinking about fish and fisheries beyond mere economic agendas. Recreational saltwater fishing is a big business and big culture. Fishing, Gone? builds on this tradition of reflection and opens up the saltwater sportfishing life as a method for thinking through the current status of marine fisheries and the environment.

The Great Barrier Reef

The iconic and beautiful Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is home to one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. With contributions from international experts, this timely and fully updated second edition of The Great Barrier Reef describes the animals, plants and other organisms of the reef, as well as the biological, chemical and physical processes that influence them. It contains new chapters on shelf slopes and fisheries and addresses pressing issues such as climate change, ocean acidification, coral bleaching and disease, and invasive species.

Old Man and the Sea

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic.

Fishes of the Rainbow

Fishes of the Rainbow introduces art lovers and tropical fish enthusiasts to Compton's world. Marine biologist David McKee provides context for Compton's work as well as an informative overview of the science of coral reef ecosystems. Artist and art historian Mark Anderson explains Compton's unique technique. This beautifully illustrated, informative, and whimsical book will appeal to aquarium buffs, art aficionados, scuba divers, and marine conservationists. Around the world, warming ocean waters and increased ocean acidification threaten coral reefs. This book offers readers a glimpse into this vibrant ecosystem and the wildlife we stand to lose.

20,000 Leagues under the Sea

Jules Verne's classic science fiction story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea tells the great tale of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus. In 1866 a strange and unknown sea monster is sighted by ships and an ocean liner is attacked. An expedition prepares in New York, to find and destroy the menacing creature. The 20,000 of the title refers to an overall distance traveled under the sea, rather than an impossible measure of descent.

Plastic Soup

Plastic Soup: An Atlas of Ocean Pollution is a beautifully-illustrated survey of the plastics clogging our seas, their impacts on wildlife and people around the world, and inspirational initiatives designed to tackle the problem. Michiel Roscam Abbing of the Plastic Soup Foundation reveals the scope of the issue: plastic trash now lurks on every corner of the planet. With striking photography and graphics, Plastic Soup brings this challenge to brilliant life for readers. Yet it also sends a message of hope; although the scale of the problem is massive, so is the dedication of activists working to check it. Plastic Soup highlights a diverse array of projects to curb plastic waste and raise awareness, from plastic-free grocery stores to innovative laws and art installations created to inform and inspire readers, Plastic Soup is a critical tool in the fight to reverse this trend.

Moby Dick

The itinerant sailor Ishmael begins a voyage on the whaling ship Pequod whose captain, Ahab, wishes to exact revenge upon the whale Moby-Dick, who destroyed his last ship and took his leg. As they search for the savage white whale, Ishmael questions all aspects of life. The story is woven in complex, lyrical language and uses many theatrical forms, such as stage direction and soliloquy. It is considered the exemplar of American Romanticism, and one of the greatest American novels of all time.

The Dance of Air and Sea

Living populations across the globe are connected by great swayings of the world's atmosphere and oceans. In The Dance of Air and Sea, Arnold Taylor focuses on the large-scale dynamics of the world's climate, looking at how the atmosphere and oceans interact, and the ways in which ecosystems on water and on land respond to changes in weather. He tells stories of how discoveries were made and the scientists who made them, and he considers the crucial issues of how the discoveries aid our response to global warming.

Castaway Tales

Ever since Robinson Crusoe washed ashore, the castaway story has survived and prospered, inspiring a multitude of writers of adventure fiction to imitate and adapt its mythic elements. In his brilliant critical study of this popular genre, Christopher Palmer traces the castaway tales' history and changes through periods of settlement, violence, and reconciliation, and across genres and languages. Showing how subsequent authors have parodied or inverted the castaway tale, Palmer concentrates on the period following H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau. These much darker visions are seen in later novels including William Golding's Lord of the Flies, J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island, and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory.

A Closer Look at Marine Debris

Marine debris is a persistent problem in many coastal areas of the United States. There are a variety of potential economic losses associated with marine debris, including effects on commercial fisheries, effects on waterfront property values, costs incurred by local governments and volunteer organizations to remove and dispose of marine debris, and more general "existence" values reflecting the public's preference for a clean environment. This book discusses marine debris and steps to mitigate its effects.

Glorious Gulf of Mexico

Between the Gulf's rich shoreline habitats and its prolific oceanic communities, thriving amid dazzling coral reefs, brine seeps, canyons, salt domes, and hard bottom banks, are more than 15,000 species, including an iconic cast of sea animals: sperm whales, manta rays, whale sharks, manatees, spotted dolphins, and more. Capturing images from locations all around the Gulf, Cancelmo reveals the beauty and glory of these diverse habitats and species. Although this is a book of sensational underwater photography, Cancelmo intends it to be more than a celebration of oceanic beauty. He also hopes to inspire a better understanding and appreciation of the natural marine habitats in the Gulf and to strengthen support for their protection and sustainment.

The Sea-Wolf

Jack London's thrilling narrative of the seven seas remains just as gripping today as it was 100 years ago A classic tale of adventure at sea, this is the story of the naïve young Humphrey van Weyden, whose ship is wrecked in a terrible storm. He is rescued by the mysterious Captain Wolf Larsen of the ship Ghost. Humphrey's new life aboard Ghost will test him to the limits of his endurance but also bring him the greatest happiness he has ever known.

The Curious Life of Krill

Krill--it's a familiar word that conjures oceans, whales, and swimming crustaceans. Scientists say they are one of the most abundant animals on the planet. But when pressed, few people can accurately describe krill or explain their ecological importance. But with climate change melting ice caps at the top and bottom of the world, and increased human activity and pollution, their evolutionary flexibility to withstand these new pressures may not be enough. Eminent krill scientist Stephen Nicol argues that it's critical to understand krill's complex biology in order to protect them as the krill fishing industry expands. Ocean enthusiasts will come away with a newfound appreciation for the complex ecology of a species we have much to learn from, and many reasons to protect.