A Diver's Guide to Underwater Malaysia Macrolife

Rating:
Summary: THE BIBLE OF MUCK DIVING!
Review: I bought this book a few weeks ago while on a diving trip to Borneo and immediately fell in love with it. This is the guidebook every discerning macro diver has been waiting for! After a long introduction and a funny, informative chapter on "the fine art of macrophotography" the authors describe in full detail more than 600 different marine species, ranging from invertebrates (nudibranchs, crustaceans and mollusks) to small and not-so-small fish. Every species entry features full, first-hand information on size, habitat, geographical range and life habits, and the book is chock-full with hundreds of absolutely stunning color pictures of the critters. Despite its restrictive title, the contents are in fact perfectly useful for any Indo-Pacific dive site, ranging from the Maldives to Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia. Some of the animals described are absolutely weird and are a fascinating first even for seasoned muck divers like myself. I cannot have enough praise for this book - it is an absolute must for any serious muck diver or photographer, and it fills to perfection an important void in the diving guidebooks panorama. It's also quite compact and not too expensive. From now on I won't take another dive trip without taking it along - bravo!

Rating:
Summary: A SURE WINNER WITH MUCK DIVERS AND CRITTER LOVERS
Review: This is a spectacular book, and a very useful one for every self-respecting Indo-Pacific muck diver and macro critter lover. For ANY diver, in fact. On the cover it curiously says "Underwater Malaysia" But the inside actually covers a much broader area, from the Eastern Indian Ocean to the Western Pacific, so it's really helpful also if you're diving Thailand, Indonesia, Borneo, the Philippines, PNG or even parts of Australia. I believe this is the first diving ID guidebook entirely dedicated to small Indo-Pacific reef animals (ie those incredibly colorful clownfish, gobies, cleaner shrimps, nudibranchs and the like) - and what a winner it is! What makes it unique for me is the number of rare reef species featured and the amazing color photographs. I discovered a lot of new interesting facts reading the species' descriptions, which are very informative, pleasantly written and often quite amusing, and the reproduction quality of the photos is, wow!, absolutely stunning. Some of the critters (look at those unbelievable flamboyant cuttlefish or the mating mandarinfish) seem to be about to jump out of the page! As guidebooks go, this one is a bit heavier than one would expect, but it is also quite small and easy to carry around on a boat or in a dive bag, and despite being a paperback and not a hardcover the binding looks like it will be able to take quite a beating (travelling scuba divers will know what I'm talking about here). I'm sure as an identification guide this great book can be equally useful to the marine biologist and the advanced aquarist, but as a whole it's obviously geared towards those actually diving and taking photographs in tropical waters. OK, all this does not come real cheap - but in my opinion, considering the quality of the photos and the huge amount of information in it, this book is worth its price to the last dime.