BY JULIA WHITTY
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. $24, 256 pages.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618119817/oriomaga-20
PART ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY, part high-seas drama, part mythology, ecology, and cultural history, this is a crowded book that chronicles the author’s meanderings from Baja California to Newfoundland, the Galápagos, and back to Baja again. The exploration is not only across the surface; Whitty takes us high up in the air where terns mate, and down three thousand feet where gulper eels nibble on whale carcasses that have, after a long, slow-motion descent, collapsed at last against the ocean floor.
The challenge with such a wide-ranging book, of course, is coherence: how to make it something other than a cobbled-together conglomeration of one woman’s adventures. What, after all, do pulverized guano, the Ekman spiral, deep-sea vents, storm petrel burrows, and…