Review by New York Times Review
A vent octopus from "Down, Down Down"; below, an old-fashioned diving suit, from "The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau." JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU used the fine word "manfish" to describe the creature he became when swimming underwater. But this red-capped French explorer, with his prominent beak and bony frame, could easily have used another metaphor. Gliding above the coral in flippered feet, he wasn't so much a thing of gills and scales. He was a bird. The image is especially apt for Cousteau, co-inventor of the Aqua-lung, which for the first time allowed divers to carry their own air, attached to nothing. Before, they went below in leaden boots, connected to boats by air hoses. Now, instead of lurching, they could soar. From boyhood, Cousteau had a recurring dream of flying with birds. After his first Aqua-lung dive, somersaulting through a liquid sky, he never had the dream again. You can see Cousteau soaring in "Manfish," by Jennifer Berne, one of two picture-book biographies that have arrived ahead of his 100th birthday next year. The other is "The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau," by Dan Yaccarino. Together they are a timely gift to the children - and many parents - who are too young to know the adventures of Captain Cousteau and his ship, Calypso. These are the unfortunates for whom nature documentaries are a 24-hour basic-cable commodity, whose sensitivity to the ocean's manifold wonders has been dulled by a limited diet of sharks, killer whales and penguins. They have no memory of le Captain's mournful monotone pondering ze inscrutable habits of ze grouper. That awful "Calypso" anthem by a yodeling John Denver stirs no associations at all. The Aqua-lung (or, today, scuba tank) is on the short list of human inventions that fundamentally changed the way we know our world, and Cousteau put it to good use for decades, exploring oceans, seas and great rivers and capturing their creatures on film. But time and tide have done sad things to Cousteau's renown. He lives most vividly in middle-aged American memory as the star of "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," which ran on ABC in the 1960s and 70s. Because of that - and despite achievements as a writer, explorer, documentary filmmaker and environmentalist - he seems today to occupy the cruel twilight reserved for half-forgotten TV personalities. How do the new books correct that injustice? Earnestly but imperfectly. They share the same straightforward narrative. Young Jacques is a sickly boy who is urged by doctors to swim to build his strength. He shows an early mechanical aptitude and a fascination with photography. He saves to buy a movie camera and immediately takes it apart. He makes films with his friends and family. He loves the water. Then destiny arrives, in a simple gift of goggles. "Beneath the water he was surrounded by silvery green forests of sea plants and fish he had never seen before," Berne writes. "Everything was silent and shimmering. It was a . . . magical underwater world. At that moment Jacques knew his life was changed forever." He eagerly takes his cameras and lights underwater. He gets a ship and a crew, and they crisscross the watery planet. Whales, otters, shipwrecks, squid: if it's wet, they find and film it They are fearless. They are also French: "When diving in the waters near France," Yaccarino writes, "Cousteau and his crew found a sunken ship full of wine jars over 2,200 years old! They tasted the wine. Alas, it was bitter." COUSTEAU longs to go deeper. He invents diving saucers and plunges to inky depths. Then, he is heartbroken. He sees the oceans and their fish slowly being destroyed. His beloved Mediterranean is becoming a sewer. He crusades to stop pollution. He leaves a legacy of books and films, bis life's labor, so that others can come to love the undersea world as he did, and save it. Yaccarino's book, written for slightly older children than "Manfish," has the plainer prose, dotted with the Captain's aphorisms: "We protect what we love." "If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. . . . And we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work." Yaccarino's illustrations are colorful, multilayered abstractions that have a mod appeal but do nothing to reward oceanographic curiosity. The writing in "Manfish" veers toward the preachy, with a few too many periods. ("Worlds that are now yours. To discover. To care for. And to love.") But it has the lovelier and more absorbing pictures, in acrylic on linen, by Éric Puybaret, who is also a diver. "Manfish" is more fun simply because it has more fish to look at, including a pullout page that, turned vertically, gives a suggestion of the teeming depths of the kingdoms that so captivated Cousteau. But even that is not all it could be. For capturing the scale and biological richness of the ocean in a picture book, it seems hard to do better than "Down, Down, Down," by Steve Jenkins. It's not a Cousteau book, but it is definitely his undersea world. Through the almost magical use of cut paper, Jenkins takes the reader on a voyage from the surface to the sunlit shallows to the very bottom of the sea. Here creatures are named and described. They almost seem to move. A flying squid catapults out of the water. A school of cold-eyed mackerel zero in on shrimpy little krill. A girdle of Venus comb jelly (a what?!) undulates, looking somehow sentient, even though it lacks brain or eyes. Jenkins clearly digs weirdness. He shows us a vampire squid and the lacy tendrils of a siphonophore. Then he turns the lights out (we're at 500 meters) and shows them again - they're bioluminescent, lighted up like Broadway bulbs. By then we're only about halfway through the book, and have seen only a fraction of the abyss. It's nearly 11,000 meters to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest spot on Earth, and Jenkins is taking us all the way. Lawrence Downes is an editorial writer at The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In this plunge into the deep, Jenkins displays his usual keen awareness of what is fascinating about biology and imparts it without sensationalism the facts speak for themselves. Light becomes an impossibility only a tiny fraction of the way down into the ocean, and the deeper this book goes, the darker the palette and the scarier and stranger the beast encountered. Sophisticated cut- and torn-paper collage-work fit the alien qualities of the subjects well; it's equally at home capturing the tiered needlepoints of lizardfish teeth as it is delivering an impressive and illuminating display of bioluminescence. The scale of just how staggeringly deep the ocean is, and how little we know of much beyond what happens at the surface, is conveyed by sidebars on each page that drop precipitously from sea level to the ocean floor many miles below. Thorough endnotes give greater detail on each of the featured creatures and help make this a most welcome introduction to the sometimes-surprising world of marine biology.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-6-Jenkins's masterful collages reveal characteristics of animals at different ocean depths from the sunlit surface to the deepest trench. For example, contrasting images of twilight-zone animals as they would appear in light with their glowing outlines in dark water illustrate bioluminescence. Those interested in specific species will find more information after the main text. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(Preschool, Primary) Jenkins takes his signature collage to the oceans, sinking readers from the surface of the Pacific Ocean down nearly 11,000 meters to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. His style works well here: with passage into each zone (from the surface to the sunlit zone to the twilight zone, etc.), the blue backgrounds shade darker and murkier, which allows the intricate cut-paper animal illustrations to pop. Readers will find familiar animals (such as sharks and jellyfish) in the upper layers and truly strange creatures (from bioluminescent squid to residents of the ooze) at the very bottom. On each double-page spread, several paragraphs of text explain the environmental conditions of the featured depth, as well as adaptations of the species therein, while a handy graph indicates exact depth measurements. Excellent details, including facts and to-scale comparisons to humans, are organized in the end pages of the book. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From above the surface to the bottom of the deepest sea canyon, unusual creatures inhabit every level of our oceans, even those seemingly hostile to life. In this intriguing introduction, Jenkins explores the Pacific, gradually descending to its depths (shown by a scale along the right hand side of each double-page spread). His signature cut-paper illustrations show more than 50 creatures, from the albatross in the air to the flatfish living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Along the way he introduces such oddities as a three-foot comb jelly called a Venus's girdle, a glowing siphonophore colony and a hairy angler with her parasitic mate. Browsers will be delighted by the variety of species, shown in their appropriate colors although not to scale. Backmatter provides some information about the animals pictured, including sizes compared to a human body or hand, although the bibliography does not seem to include the sources used for those facts. Once again, Jenkins provides an almost irresistible entry into our natural world for the youngest readers. (Informational picture book. 5-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
