Life begins in the ocean. Deep Water is a celebration of life in and around the world's oceans. It explores the range of life they support. From the tiniest organisms to the magnificence of whales, the diversity, inter-dependency and fragility of life in the seas are revealed and explained. The destructive effects of man's exploitation of the oceans are shown, but Deep Water demonstrates how individuals - in collaboration with local communities, scientists and governments - are creating economically sustainable alternatives. A key message of the book is the importance of living in respectful coexistence with all species to guarantee at least a future for human life on Earth.

Oceans and seas cover more than 70 per cent of the Earth's surface. Hence, they have been though to have an infinite capacity of absorbing waste. About 60 per cent of humanity, therefore, lives within 60 kilometres of coasts. The fallout? Natural habitats are being lost through reclamation for urban and industrial development. Near-shore waters are being threatened by industrial waste. Contamination of beaches threatens public health and seafood. Plastic litter accumulates on coastlines. Some of the waste products of coastal development, augmented by discharges through rivers spread out to the oceans, are carried out by the atmosphere and currents.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director, Klaus Topfer, could not have put it better in his introduction, "The Haida people of Canada's Pacific coast have a saying that brings out the challenge of protecting our natural heritage very vividly. They challenge us to turn the telescope around with the saying: 'We do not inherit the land from our forefathers, we borrow it from our children.' If all of us approached issues from this perspective, we could take a firm step back from the ecological brink and breathe easier while our oceans and seas renew their resources." The authors too conclude with: "The ocean is life -- our life -- and we must all play our part in its survival."

Beautifully designed and produced by the Living Earth Foundation in collaboration with the UNEP and Global Ocean, the book features the work of many of the world's leading marine photographers. But it is more than a visual delight. It is packed with information on everything from the formation of the oceans to the role of climate, strategies for survival and reproduction, and the man-made perils of pollution and over-exploitation. It is a valuable resource with case studies of activists and contact details for dozens of organisations that are influencing the future of this vital and endangered part of the planet.

If reaching out to people and relaying this message is the intention of co-authors Julian Caldecott and Melanie Salmon, the book should be able to do it well. A definite plus point for the Living Earth Foundation publication is its trilingual format. For a book that is written in English, French and Spanish, Deep Water naturally reaches out to a substantial number of people. It comes across as a colourful mini-encyclopaedia with an underlying thread of concern that runs throughout the book. The concern is voiced more discretely towards the end. The book consciously treads a middle path -- between celebration of life and the concern at the present and the future. Since the book is not meant to cater to ecologists-environmentalists, the authors make their point very subtly.  And they steer clear of the pitfall that afflicts such books -- they do not miss the trees for the forest.

Cloontha it is called-a locality within the bending of an arm. A few scattered houses, the old fort, lime-dank and jabbery and from the great whooshing belly of the lake between grassland and callow land a road, sluicing the little fortresses of ash and elder, a crooked road to the mouth of the mountain. Fields that mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too. In the summer months calves going suck suck suck, blue dribble threading from their black lips, their white faces stark as clowns. Hawthorn and whitethorn, boundaries of dreaming pink. Byroad and bog road. The bronze gold grasses in a tacit but unremitting sway. Listen. Shiver of wild grass and cluck of wild fowl. Quickening.

Fathoms deep the frail and rusted shards, the relics of battles of the long ago, and in the basins of limestone, quiet in death, the bone babes and the bone mothers, the fathers too. The sires. The buttee men and the long-legged men who hacked and hacked and into the torn breathing soil planted a first potato crop, the diced tubers that would be the bread of life until the fungus came.

According to the annals it happened on Our Lady's Eve. The blight came in the night and wandered over the fields, so that by morning the upright stalks were black ribbons of rot. Slow death for man and beast. A putrid pall over the landscape, hungry marching people meek and mindless, believing it had not struck elsewhere. Except that it had. Death at every turn. The dead faces yellow as parchment, the lips a liquorice black from having gorged on the sweet poisonous stuff, the apples of death.

They say the enemy came in the night, but the enemy can come at any hour, be it dawn or twilight, because the enemy is always there and these people know it, locked in a tribal hunger that bubbles in the blood and hides out on the mountain, an old carcass waiting to rise again, waiting to roar again, to pit neighbour against neighbour and dog against dog in the crazed and phantom lust for a lip of land. Fields that mean more than fields, fields that translate into nuptials into blood; fields lost, regained, and lost again in that fickle and fractured sequence of things; the sons of Oisin, the sons of Conn and Connor, the sons of Abraham, the sons of Seth, the sons of Ruth, the sons of Delilah, the warring sons of warring sons cursed with that same irresistible thrall of madness which is the designate of living man, as though he had to walk back through time and place, back to the voiding emptiness to repossess ground gone for ever.

Heraldic and unflagging it chugged up the mountain road, the sound, a new sound jarring in on the profoundly pensive landscape. A new sound and a new machine, its squat front the colour of baked brick, the ridges of the big wheels scummed in muck, wet muck and dry muck, leaving their maggoty trails. It was the first tractor on the mountain and its arrival would be remembered and relayed; the day, the hour of evening, and the way crows circled above it, blackening the sky, fringed, soundless, auguring. There were birds always; crows, magpies, thrushes, skylarks, but rarely like that, so many and so massed. It was early autumn, one of those still autumn days, several fields emptied of hay, the stubble a sullied gold, hips and haws on the briars and a wild dog rose which because of its purple hue had been named after the blood of Christ-Sangria Jesu. © Edna O'Brien

What Sandra Scofield said in The Chicago Tribune:
The theme of emotional self-immolation of desirous women has served O'Brien through a plenitude of fiction, both short and long, and won her lavish praise and some carping. Fancied up in the rollick of her earthy, even brazen humour, her primal rhythms and her potent, rich vocabulary, sex and punishment have almost always been at the centre of things -- too often, for some critics. She has repeated herself, yet with such eclat, she has convinced her readers again and again of Ireland's savage heart.


What Brooke Allen wrote in The New York Times:
O'Brien's beautiful and lush novel ''Wild Decembers'' could be described as a fictional working out of the crippling Irish fears she describes. Joseph Brennan and his much younger sister, Breege, live on a desolate mountain in the west of Ireland. Joseph is a good man, but he has been emotionally stunted by his family and culture. The last in a line of small farmers that goes back hundreds of years into the unremembered past, he has been brought up to worship the ancestral land above all else: ''Fields that mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too.'' Describing his mountain, he can only say, ''It's God to me.'' God, for Joseph, ''was not a bearded man in the sky but here. . . . In Cloontha, especially at night, alone with nature.'' © The New York Times Company

Having explained the construction and purpose of the book, let me now briefly, before the critics do their job, outline some of its limitations. Because it tries in not too many pages to cope with several major issues, the book does not do justice to some of them. Thus, though I hope it is quite obvious that the ecological dimension and women's liberation are for me fundamental elements of any project for the future, these two topics do not figure prominently in these pages. Partly because it was not the purpose of the book, largely because other authors can write about these subjects so much better and have done so. This preference for subjects one knows intimately, some will accuse, may explain the emphasis on Poland rather than Hungary or France rather than Italy, though one can plead that the choice is justified on its own. In any case, this argument cannot be used for the admitted Euro-centered bias of the story. This is a question of choice, since the assumption underlying the book is that for all sorts of reasons-the attack on the welfare state, the popular feeling for social conquests and political traditions, weakened but not gone-western Europe is likely to be the terrain of the first big confrontation of the new millennium. I will be delighted to be proved wrong if the limelight is switched to Asia or Latin America, because it is there that the revolt against capital's global offensive has, even earlier, taken the form of a counterattack.

After all, this book wants to be a contribution to a debate which cannot afford to be parochial. It looks forward to publications inspired by the same refusal of resignation, but looking at the system from a different angle, because written in Tokyo or Seoul, in Mexico City or Sao Paulo. For the struggle is increasingly and inevitably international. History, far from coming to a stop, has quickened pace. The downturn precipitated by the financial crisis in Asia is no recession, but a slump as we have not seen for years. Its repercussions are unpredictable. There are also signs that France is not the only place where, after a couple of decades of absolute domination, the ruling ideology is starting to be questioned. But, together with hope comes danger, its companion. If we do not quickly offer progressive solutions to the growing popular discontent, there are plenty of dark saviors waiting in the wings.

Above all, this is not an essay announcing the impending collapse of capitalism and the advent of a socialist millennium. Too many great expectations have been shattered to revive such exercises. But the certainty of victory is not indispensable for action. Its possibility is a sufficient spur. Whose Millennium? is fundamentally a gesture of revolt against Tina, a refusal of the prevailing religion of resignation and of its natural ally, irresponsibility. We are not tied to the system, and nobody can prevent us from looking beyond the capitalist horizon. We cannot just wash our hands and pretend. We are not doomed to impotence and inaction by fate.

Men at some time are masters of their fate:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves....

Cassius may have exaggerated. The main fault is not in ourselves. It lies in our unjust and unequal society, in a social system that in no way corresponds to the potentialities of our development, just as our technological sophistication contrasts with the primitiveness of our social organization. But we cannot just plead innocence and irresponsibility. We are not prisoners of this system. Though sobered up by past defeats and burdened by the weight of our environment, we, too, can try to be masters of our fate and fight for a different future. © Daniel Singer

It was in 1984 that veteran journalist and NBC Nightly new anchor Tom Brokaw travelled to Normandy, France, to make a documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Brokaw was aware of the historical backdrop of the invasion, but did not have an inkling how it would hit him emotionally. Flooded with memories of his own childhood days during World War II, Brokaw met veterans at a function and asked them to go back in time and recount their own experiences. They did. It was not a story that he manufactured overnight. After a decade-and-a-half of constant correspondence and interviews, Brokaw has been able to cross-stitch The Greatest Generation.

The author's contention is simple -- that the generation which grew up during the Depression, vanquished tyranny as youths, and then delivered prosperity and freedom from Communism as adults is a unique generation. What he does to drive home his point is an intertwined tale of anecdotes. Brokaw's World War book is neither war reportage nor a perspectival analysis of the war in any way. It is a well-collated volume of ideas, opinions and impressions. His point is simple -- to glorify that generation, even running the risk of sounding quite maudlin quite often in the book. Yes, the generation was great, but the superlative is a bit too much to take.

Willy-nilly (maybe, the former is more true) the author propagates myths in the bargain. Firstly, he writes of Americans during World War II, "They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest." This is negation of historical truth since till the attack on Pearl Harbour, only 30 per cent of Americans were willing to go to war with Germany and Italy. It was only after the American involvement in the war began that dissent and disenchantment began fading away.

Brokaw's unnecessary deification campaign crosses tolerance levels when he writes, "They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for Federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare." To give a particular generation all credit for civil rights legislations and medicare is a sheer giveaway of his intentions -- to deify a generation, come hell or high water.


What Amazon.com said:
After almost 15 years and hundreds of letters and interviews, Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation, a representative cross-section of the stories he came across. However, this collection is more than a mere chronicle of a tumultuous time, it's history made personal by a cast of everyday people transformed by extraordinary circumstances: the first women to break the homemaker mould, minorities suffering countless indignities to boldly fight for their country, infantrymen who went on to become some of the most distinguished leaders in the world, small-town kids who became corporate magnates. From the reminiscences of George Bush and Julia Child to the astonishing heroism and moving love stories of everyday people, The Greatest Generation salutes those whose sacrifices changed the course of American history. © Amazon.com, Inc


What The New York Times said:
Still, in ''The Greatest Generation'' Brokaw succeeds in his goal of memorialising the experiences of representative Americans in the deadliest war in history. As he notes, ''They were proud of what they accomplished but they rarely discussed their experiences, even with each other.'' It is a tribute to Brokaw's skill as a reporter that he has managed to elicit so many memorable stories from reticent people. © The New York Times Company