Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef

Southwestern Writers Collection Series, The Wittliff Collections

by Stephen Harrigan

This evocative account of the months Stephen Harrigan spent diving on the coral reefs off Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992.

Genres: Adventure

287 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1992

About the author

Stephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi.
He is a longtime writer for Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. His film column for Texas Monthly was a finalist for the 2015 National Magazine Awards.
Harrigan is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for Best Novel of the West.Remember Ben Clayton was published by Knopf in 2011 and praised by Booklist as a "stunning work of art" and by The Wall Street Journal as a "a poignantly human monument to our history." Remember Ben Clayton also won a Spur Award, as well as the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, given by the Society of American Historians for the best work of historical fiction. In the Spring of 2013, the University of Texas Press published a career-spanning volume of his essays, The Eye of the Mammoth, which reviewers called “masterful” (from a starred review in Publishers Weekly), “enchanting and irresistible” (the Dallas Morning News) and written with “acuity and matchless prose.”(Booklist). His latest novel is A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.
Among the many movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO’s award-winning The Last of His Tribe, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and King of Texas, a western retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear for TNT, which starred Patrick Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, and Roy Scheider. His most recent television production was The Colt, an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For his screenplay of The Colt, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the Humanitas Prize. Young Caesar, a feature adaptation of Conn Iggulden’s Emperor novels, which he co-wrote with William Broyles, Jr., is currently in development with Exclusive Media.
A 1971 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at UT’s James A. Michener Center for Writers and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. He is also a founding member of CAST (Capital Area Statues, Inc.) an organization in Austin that commissions monumental works of art as gifts to the city. He is the recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s Texas Writers Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was recently inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Stephen Harrigan and his wife Sue Ellen have three daughters and four grandchildren.

Reviews

[Jennifer Pletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of the author's time in Turks and Caicos. He went there for a deep sea diving expedition and had a chance to really explore the Caribbean waters. He talks in depth about all of the creatures he saw, the people he met on the island, and of the importance of protecting the wildlife of the sea.



I liked this book more than I thought. I was worried it was going to be mostly about details of scuba diving, and it was a bit, but it was written well. It is interesting in the fact that it talks about the history of scuba diving and the scuba gear that was invented so that people could explore underwater at greater depths. This book was written in 1992, and I know that scuba gear has even progressed further since then and allow divers to go deeper still.



He talked a lot about the island and the people, and the wildlife that lives there. He shared a lot of interesting personal anecdote that kept the story alive and moving. His love for diving and the ocean is apparent in his story telling, and I am glad I found this book.

[Thomas Gruber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great story of the author's immersion (pun intended 😉) in the environment on and around Grand Turk Island in the southern Caribbean. Very good description of the diving and sea life there, but also the people and history of the island itself, and some self-reflection of what the experience meant to him. I found it a quick and enjoyable read.

[Tifany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have an interest in fish, so I started out in favor of this book, but I think anyone interested in writing would enjoy it as well. It's one of the most brilliantly descriptive books I've ever read--brilliant in the sense that every description reads like something you always knew, or thought you knew, but had never quite figured out how to say. Also, more fun stories of nitrogen narcosis. I've read a lot of books about the ocean and the creatures that live in it and this was perhaps my favorite--also, Cousteau's Living Ocean, sadly out of print.

[Scot Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn between 2 and 3 stars for this book. There are a few reasons I am not rating it higher. First and foremost, I was bothered by factual inaccuracies. For instance, phytoplankton are not plants. They include species of protists, archaebacteria, and eubacteria, but not plantae. Zooplankton are also not all animals; this group includes many species of protists as well. When the author touches on decompression physiology, it also is inaccurate given the knowledge at the time the book was written. There are other examples, but I'll stop there. Second, while I'm no prude (quite the opposite), if your fantasy is to masturbate in a coral reef cave, I don't feel that's an appropriate thing to include in a book like this one. Finally, the book just didn't grip me. This may be my own problem and others may disagree, but I just had trouble getting into it, despite having done a ton of reef diving in my life and normally devouring any literature related to such. I ended up giving it 3 stars instead of 2 because I appreciate a lot of the author's descriptions of marine life, and in particular the attention he draws to some of the issues facing coral reef ecosystems thanks to human actions, such as harvesting of turtle eggs and turtles, harvesting of various corals, dredging, etc.