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Ocean
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience.
From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience.
From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
- GenresNonfiction
192 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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June 22, 2020Bloomsbury Object Lessons series presents slim books on a variety of objects to get to the heart of “the hidden lives of ordinary things.” Each book is written by a different author whose relationship to their chosen object may be professional, artistic, or personal. In the case of Ocean, though, the author, Steve Mentz, picked an immense object, and it seems to have been too big to fit into this 150 page volume.
Mentz, has spent his life studying and professing literature of the sea. The book, therefore, is academic in style and its approach is based more in literary theory than oceanography.
I read this book hoping to gain new insights into the sea’s history or the chemical makeup of its watery depths. Perhaps for this reason, I was disappointed. Despite its title, Ocean is more about maritime literature than about the ocean itself. Veering off into close-reads of poetry, and even referencing Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a very abstract effort to compare sailors to the cyborgs referenced there-in, this book is not for the casual ocean-hobbyist.
However, and I cannot stress this enough, this book is not about the science of the ocean, nor is it about the myriad creatures it contains; what this book is, is a small collection of literary criticism about books about the ocean. Mentz writes about Emily Dickinson’s ocean poetry, the Iliad and Odyssey, Herman Melville, Rachel Carson’s environmental writing, and other ocean-themed texts. Because of this, some chapters may alienate readers who have not read the work discussed.
Still, some concepts, like that of “wet globalization,” “deterritorialization,” and an obscure reference to a “general theory of autogenous vessels” may capture the more theory-driven reader’s interest. But, even for those like myself who enjoy literary theory, the broad range (from classical to romantic, from poetry to non-fiction) means that unless the reader is already familiar with ocean literature, they will likely find Ocean too particular to access.
Mentz, has spent his life studying and professing literature of the sea. The book, therefore, is academic in style and its approach is based more in literary theory than oceanography.
I read this book hoping to gain new insights into the sea’s history or the chemical makeup of its watery depths. Perhaps for this reason, I was disappointed. Despite its title, Ocean is more about maritime literature than about the ocean itself. Veering off into close-reads of poetry, and even referencing Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a very abstract effort to compare sailors to the cyborgs referenced there-in, this book is not for the casual ocean-hobbyist.
However, and I cannot stress this enough, this book is not about the science of the ocean, nor is it about the myriad creatures it contains; what this book is, is a small collection of literary criticism about books about the ocean. Mentz writes about Emily Dickinson’s ocean poetry, the Iliad and Odyssey, Herman Melville, Rachel Carson’s environmental writing, and other ocean-themed texts. Because of this, some chapters may alienate readers who have not read the work discussed.
Still, some concepts, like that of “wet globalization,” “deterritorialization,” and an obscure reference to a “general theory of autogenous vessels” may capture the more theory-driven reader’s interest. But, even for those like myself who enjoy literary theory, the broad range (from classical to romantic, from poetry to non-fiction) means that unless the reader is already familiar with ocean literature, they will likely find Ocean too particular to access.
May 16, 2020
I am a fan of the Object Lessons series overall - each is essentially a long form essay on a very specific topic. The authors, it seems, have considerable latitude in how they approach the subject - at times this has made them exceptionally interesting and at other times they can feel disjointed. This one was right in the middle of the pack. It was heavy on the interplay between ocean and literature, which I enjoyed, but there were other aspects that he referred to that I would have liked to spend more time with.
December 6, 2025
17 ‘The key task today for sea-thinkers like him, Patton, and environmentalist Carl Safina is to learn to see the sea. The alien ocean must come fully into view. To create what Safina calls a “sea ethic,” a marine companion to Aldo Leopold’s famous “land ethic,” requires imaginative engagements with alien spaces.’
121 ‘But the tension she observes between dissolving saltwater and eroding rock remains the essential contrapuntal narrative of land and sea:
It is an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped—the dissolving of the rocks, the leaching out of their contained minerals, the carrying of the rock fragments and dissolved minerals to the ocean. And over the eons of time, the sea has grown ever more bitter with the salt of the continents.
None of the many subjects Carson touches in The Sea Around Us gives rise to more resonant poetry than ocean sediments. She describes the sinking of biotic materials from dead microbes and other living creatures as a “long snowfall.” “The sediments” that fall, she writes, “are a sort of epic poem of the earth.” Falling into the deep ocean as if into endless history, ocean sediments represent an archive of natural processes, “the outpouring of volcanoes, the advance and retreat of the ice, the searing aridity of desert lands, the sweeping destruction of floods.” In the vertical dimension, Ocean records planetary history.’
122 ‘On the salty edge, Carson’s poetic voice anticipates by half a century the visionary intermingled human and nonhuman ecopoetics of twenty-first century thinkers, including Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, and Bruno Latour. Her sea is Alien and Core, a no-place “in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.”’
121 ‘But the tension she observes between dissolving saltwater and eroding rock remains the essential contrapuntal narrative of land and sea:
It is an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped—the dissolving of the rocks, the leaching out of their contained minerals, the carrying of the rock fragments and dissolved minerals to the ocean. And over the eons of time, the sea has grown ever more bitter with the salt of the continents.
None of the many subjects Carson touches in The Sea Around Us gives rise to more resonant poetry than ocean sediments. She describes the sinking of biotic materials from dead microbes and other living creatures as a “long snowfall.” “The sediments” that fall, she writes, “are a sort of epic poem of the earth.” Falling into the deep ocean as if into endless history, ocean sediments represent an archive of natural processes, “the outpouring of volcanoes, the advance and retreat of the ice, the searing aridity of desert lands, the sweeping destruction of floods.” In the vertical dimension, Ocean records planetary history.’
122 ‘On the salty edge, Carson’s poetic voice anticipates by half a century the visionary intermingled human and nonhuman ecopoetics of twenty-first century thinkers, including Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, and Bruno Latour. Her sea is Alien and Core, a no-place “in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.”’
December 12, 2022
ahoy! the sea beckons! it connects and estranges, buoys and drowns, fascinates and repels. I love her. and this object lesson is great for a sea lover, to dip your toes into the fascination that the sea has held forever, and to understand a bit of its allure and its mystery. poetry, some sciencey passages, some storytelling of seafaring and the like, in its bitter salt and these words on the page we taste an ancient intimacy
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March 11, 2021This book was brief and non-exhaustive, but was a good gateway to other works that an ocean reader might be interested in, and the author had a lot of interesting musings to offer. It was, as the Frost poem it lists says, Neither Out Far Nor In Deep, but that's okay.
Full blog post here: tylerwolanin.com/blog/2021/3/10/what-...
Full blog post here: tylerwolanin.com/blog/2021/3/10/what-...
September 13, 2021
More of a 2.5 but: Eh
November 17, 2021
Mentz tries to avoid a colonialist framework in this book, but his discussions of "wet globalization" reify colonial violence upon non-Western bodies.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews