Dolphins

The Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau

by Jacques-Yves Cousteau

First American Edition, Blue Cloth, Sm Quarto, Dust Jacket Missing, 1975, PP.304, Illustrated

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Animals

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Born in 1910, was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, and filmmaker, who studied the sea. Although he is most famous to us from his television programmes, he also co-developed the aqua-lung, and pioneered marine conservation as a political and scientific priority.
In the Calypso, an ex-Royal Navy minesweeper, Cousteau visited the most interesting waters of the planet. During these trips he produced many books and films. He gained three Oscars for; The Silent World, The Golden Fish, and World Without Sun, as well as many other top awards including the Palme d'Or in 1956 at the Cannes Film Festival.
Cousteau liked to call himself an "oceanographic technician". He was in reality a sophisticated lover of nature who found a way of communicating complex scientific and biological concepts to ordinary people. While he was criticised at the time by some academics for failing to express science 'properly', his work permitted many people to explore the resources of the "blue continent". As an example of his influence, in 1975, folk singer John Denver composed the song "Calypso" as a tribute to Cousteau and his research ship Calypso. The song reached the number one position on the Billboard 100 charts.
Cousteau's work did a great deal to popularize knowledge of underwater biology and was featured in the long-lived documentary television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau which began in 1968. On January 11, 1996, the Calypso sank in Singapore harbour. Cousteau died on June 25, 1997 - his work is continued by his son Jean-Michel and his grandson Fabien, who studies sharks from a custom-built shark-shaped submarine.

Reviews

[H R · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book! Honestly, I wasn’t expecting for me to like this book as much as I did. I definitely didn’t expect to get emotional while reading it. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction books, and oftentimes I find that they can be very dry, even when regarding animals. That’s one of the surprising things about nonfiction books about them because of how expressive they are. This book found a great balance between informational and captivating. It talks about everything from dolphin hierarchies to the process of capturing a dolphin. One of the things I loved most about this book were the stories of the dolphins Dolly, Opo, and Nina. Learning about their lives, the people in them, and how they interacted with one another was truly beautiful! I grew attached to them whilst reading, which made their deaths much harder to read. Another aspect I loved about the book is the many photographs and drawings inside of it. I’m a visual learner, so seeing the dolphins I read about, prototypes for tools, and divers interacting with the dolphins was very helpful! Additionally, the book makes use of little symbols about certain names that the reader may not be familiar with when reading about the prominent figures of the dolphin researching world. These symbols appear at the bottom of the page where they are mentioned and expand on the person mentioned, and sometimes note their relation to the author. This knowledge is very useful and helps in understanding, especially for people like me who just happened to pick up the book with no previous knowledge about it. In the second part of the book it does get much more info-heavy, but this is informational so I can understand that. If I could recommend this book to others, I would recommend it to people interested in marine biology. This provides helpful insight into one of the most interesting creatures of the ocean without being a difficult read. I’d also recommend this book to anyone interested in dolphins, or anybody who lives near them. I’ve found that learning in-depth about something you love expands your appreciation for it. I’ve come out of this book with a newfound admiration for dolphins after learning about them and what they’re capable of.

[Morgan Botting · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of good information in this book, especially for its time. I enjoyed it a lot, but there were a couple points where they did questionable things for research. Unfortunately that is the kind of stuff they were doing at the time.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacques killed way too many dolphins in the making of this book.

[El Rato Pequeño · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected a dry and somewhat outdated book about dolphins, but this just completely surpassed my expectations. Cousteau, in addition to being a prolific scientist, was also a gifted storyteller, and there's not a single section here that feels like just a dry infodump. The portions of the book concerning dolphin biology are what they are, this being a book from the 70s, but it's impressive to note how well almost all of it still holds up 50 years later. The parts that carry the most value for me are the firsthand accounts from Cousteau and his colleagues, being among the first modern age people to study and capture wild dolphins, and their descriptions of sailing amidst a vast dolphin congregation of hundreds of individuals, or how they saved a fishing settlement in coastal Mauritania with their cetacean knowledge, are unlikely to be experienced ever again by anyone else. The icing on top are the plentiful photographs adorning the book, giving proper shape and weight to these extraordinary encounters.

[Cws]

J599Cou

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Going through old papers, I found this was a book I read as part of a school project.