Jacques Cousteau and the Undersea World (Explorers of New Worlds)

Rating:
Summary: Roger King, Explorers of New Worlds: Jacques Cousteau and t
Review: This is one of a series of some twenty books, ranging from Marco Polo to the Apollo Astronauts (see p. 2). It contains more science than other juvenile biographies of Cousteau that I have examined, including useful discussions of the effects of water pressure on divers (at pp. 16-18) and of "rapture of the deep" (at p. 20). Another positive feature is the bolding of occasional pertinent vocabulary words, which are defined in a glossary in the back of the volume (see pp. 60-61). The book offers suggestions for further reading (at p. 62), although these are of only moderate use. The volume is written in a comprehendible, although slightly "slangy" (see "earned a bad rap" at p. 29), style, and is reasonably well illustrated with pictures of Cousteau and his researchers.

King's biography does cover Cousteau's prickly relationship with his sons (at p. 53) and his remarriage (at p. 57), although it does not mention the previous affair with his second wife, his brother Philippe's collaboration with the Axis during World War II, or indeed the stone-throwing affair of Jacques' youth, which led to expulsion from school. The mistakes which do occur are fairly minor. Cousteau met his first wife, Simone at a party in Paris, not in Toulon (see p. 14), according to both Richard Munson and Axel Madsen's more thorough biographies. King's discussion of the bathyscaphe (at p. 27) ignores the earlier bathysphere, which had also been used to plumb the depths. Nor does there seem to be any reason to have omitted 19th century vessels when speaking of times "when mariners did not have the sophisticated navigation equipment that sailors use today" (see p. 45). Finally, to say that all the silver, gold and gems found on Silver Bank had been "plundered" (at p. 46) is to ignore Spain's extensive New World mining operations and distort the historical record.