This book is about Jacques Cousteau's invention of the aqualung, and the first few years of experimentation with it. His tale is sort of meandering (like this review) and jumps from topic to topic without really fleshing out any of them in tremendous detail. It is more of a summary of what he was doing.

The parts of the book that shine are when he is describing his encounters with marine life, and the effects of nitrogen narcosis (or whatever it is). I can give this book a tepid recommendation, maybe knocking it up a half-star if you are at all interested in SCUBA diving. The book was interesting, although I never really got a sense of his passion for diving (even though he certainly had it).

This is #92 in the National Geographic 100 best adventure books list. ( )

The Silent World is worth reading, possibly even rereading, for curiosity's sake more than anything else.

Jacques Cousteau and close allies, physicist Tailliez and skin diver Dumas, famously pioneered the development of diving equipment such as the aqaulung and of diving as a whole. Their progress from experimental amateurs, messing around on the shores of occupied France, to government-backed 'Undersea Research Group', alternately exploring wrecks at record depths and assisting with mine clearance. In Cousteau's telling, the group's passage through an interesting pocket of history sounds, if not accidental, highly improvised at times. There is an engaging air of makeshift adventure.

Given Cousteau's reputation as somewhere between a conservationist and scientist, the anthropocentric viewpoint is only challenged by the sea itself, rarely the animals who live in it. Marine life of all kinds is massacred on the most spurious grounds: gastronomic, pseudo-scientific, sporting, aesthetic. Yet there are moments of horror at man's destruction of rape of coral and tuna alike, and its casual wantonness, which hint at the greater enlightened view which was to come.

Nitrogen narcosism - or l'ivresse des grandes profondeurs, the drunkenness of great depths - gives divers dreamlike illusions of invincibility and confusion. The passages which describe this strangest of underwater experiences are among the most absorbing of the book. Divers lose any sense of time and urgency, feel pervasive wellbeing, hilarity, even the conviction that they no need of the cumbersome mouthpiece that feeds them air.

Like many explorers and successful men, Cousteau takes a little too much interest and pride in his own endeavour. Cousteau, or his translator, manages more moments of poetry than of hyperbole, but a fiercer editor would have done a lot of good. The following sentence is neat proof: "occasionally we wre able to steal hours of dawdling inside the sea, where a man could expose his senses to the nuances of colour and light, listen for the lonely creaks of the ocean, and finger the water like a voluptuary." Lyrical language tempered by concession to third rate romance at the last minute. A similar fault mars the book as a whole: the structure and narrative lack focus. We hear about forays that might seem more consequential if the protagonists had been fleshed out more. For its place in the history of the 20th century though, and its flashes of an environment that is both alien and enticing, The Silent World still deserves to be read. ( )

The Silent World was Jacques Cousteau's first book and his introduction to the English speaking world (although a French national he wrote the book in English). The documentary of the same name, showing events detailed in the book, was released in 1956 and won an Academy Award, launching Cousteau on his famed career. The Silent World has never gone out of print (estimates at over 5 million copies sold) and Cousteau went on to publish over 50 books and countless documentaries as well as a tireless advocate of ocean conservation.

In 1943 in southern France in the middle of WWII, Cousteau and friends invented modern scuba-diving. It seems unlikely with France effectively out of the war under Axis occupation, many Frenchmen had a lot of time but not a lot of resources, even basics such as food were in short supply. Cousteau, in his early 30s, found himself in a sort of proto-hippie group who lived on the beach diving for fish and showing off how deep they could free dive, manly men doing manly things while they sat out the war. Eventually they started experimenting to find ways to go deeper (stay under longer) and Cousteau commissioned the first "aqua-lung", basically the first modern scuba tank with a breathing regulator. Prior to this assisted diving was tethered to a breathing tube at the surface. Suddenly Cousteau and his two diving buddies, Frederic Dumas and Phillipe Taillez, were exploring the undersea world in ways never done before: free-floating like a fish with extended lengths underwater. They did a lot of experimentation with equipment and the effects of depth on the human bodily, discovering the rules of diving that are still followed to this day.

The Silent World is a memoir of the most interesting and dangerous experiences during that golden 10 year period between 1943 and 53 when scuba diving went from a new invention to an established and important occupation. After the war there was a lot of wrecks that needed salvaging and harbors to be de-mined. Cousteau took part in underwater archeology trips. A daring and almost fatal descent into a freshwater sinkhole cave. Wreck diving, encounters with sharks and whales. In terms of underwater exploration, Cousteau and his team were like Neal Armstrong on the moon or Christopher Columbus - but more than just explorers they were film-makers and popularizer's of the beauty of the ocean. He soon gave up his harpoon and hunted the depths with a camera, often saying people preserve what they like, and he hoped to show the oceans in a way people would like. It's easy to imagine this book being written by someone else, a dry technical manual that is outdated - but Cousteau's book remains timeless, it speaks to the imagination of limitless possibility, beauty of the ocean and excitement of discovery. I have no doubt in 50 more years it will still be in print and widely read and enjoyed.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

The reson I began reading this book was because I really enjoy Wes Anderson's films, and I know he is heavily influenced/is a big fan of J.Y. Cousteau. I began to read his book thinking it would be full of technical marine terms and boring facts about aquatic life, but Cousteau is an amazing narrator and story teller. His retelling of his adventures diving with the first SCUBA apparatus and competitions to see who could dive the deepest (resulting in the death of a crewmate) were so much more vivid than I expected. I believe everyone should read his book.

Coustou’s autobiography is not terribly well written. For a man who has seen amazing things beneath the waves, his descriptions are somewhat elliptic and lackluster, leading me to believe that he focused on film precisely because it does the describing work for you. This book also feels elliptic, as if he carefully omitted a great deal of his life, including all of his reconnaissance work for the French resistance during World War Two, that did not suit his immediate purpose. Still, it’s a good read. Why? Because Jacques Cousteau is the real deal. I mostly knew him from his eco-advocacy films that were always on PBS during my childhood. He showed us a new world, but he did much more than that. He invented scuba diving. That’s right, he invented it. What sort of person sticks a tube of compressed air on his back and then swims right into a sunken ship full of eels? People like Jacques Cousteau. When Cousteau and his team starting diving, they did not know about the bends, nitrogen narcosis ( which he calls, with superb French élan, “rapture of the deep”), or shark attacks, and they learned the hard way. Yet he survived, and kept coming back for more. He is intrepidity itself. What the book lacks in brilliance, it makes up in passion, exploration, and courage. ( )

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