Tens of thousands of feet down on the floor of the East Pacific, the geologist peeping out of the Alvin, a highly manoeuvrable, 22-foot, three-man submersible, was in for the shock of his life. What he expected to notice at the deep-sea hypothermal vents was a field of bare lava. What he saw instead was an entirely new world of living creatures: huge clams, mussels, shrimp, fish and things that look like worms. "Isn't the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?" he asked himself. But then, why should it be? Cumulatively speaking, only one per cent of the world's ocean floors have been explored so far. The abyss still remains unexplored. So says Robert Ballard.

If the man known better for having discovered the wreckage of the Titanic has something to aver, it might be well worth listening to Robert Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration and former director of the Center for Marine Exploration. This one is, however, not about the unsinkable ship (he wrote 'The Discovery of the Titanic' a little more than a decade back). Here he amalgamates science, history and breathtaking first-hand accounts in a volume that is less preoccupied with the undersea discoveries he has made in course of his hundred-plus deep-sea expeditions -- he is more concerned with the technological advances that made these discoveries possible.

Ballard begins in June 1930 when Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton made their pioneering under-sea exploration effort in a bathysphere that the latter called "the tank". The bathysphere was a globe made of steel an inch and a half thick, and took them down to a depth of 1,426 feet. During the expeditions that followed Beebe is said to have seen strange creatures out the window of his vessel. He gave them names like "long-finned ghostfishes", "abyssal rainbow gars" and "exploding flammenwerfer shrimps". Many said Beebe had let his imagination run riot; but with ninety nine per cent of the sea floors still remaining terra incognita there might be many more surprises in the offing like the one that astonished the Alvin geologist.

Even a few decades back, people knew as little about the depths of the oceans as they did about deep space. They still do. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface; the average depth is two miles or so. Yet, humans are yet to dive more than a few thousand feet below the water surface on an average. When his contemporaries were more keen on extra-terrestrials, Ballard turned his attention his own planet. He had been charged up by the exploits of the bathyscaph, Trieste. In 1960, Frenchman Jacques Piccard and American Don Walsh piloted Trieste down to Challenger Deep, "two hundred miles off the island of Guam . . . the deepest spot in the world, some 35,800 feet below the ocean's surface." Mount Everest had already been conquered, but this point in the opposite direction went a good mile farther from sea level.

Ballard, like all others, badly wanted to discover the Titanic. The purpose, in his case, was different. He recollects, "My motive was in part fascination - some at Woods Hole used the word 'obsession' - but it was not a morbid obsession." This man was not in the quest for souvenirs up for the picking from the wreck -- it was the publicity which would have accompanied such a discovery that he was after. The publicity would bring in more funds and he could continue working on the development of new, sophisticated machines. In 1985, he made the discovery of his life -- the wreckage of the Titanic.

It is rather ironical that Ballard would have needed this kind of publicity. He had long made discoveries that had contributed more to the knowledge and understanding of the Earth than the discovery of a ship. In 1979, he saw first-hand what oceanographers had been talking about: existence of superhot water spewing forth from deep-sea vents. What came to be known for certain now was why the waters of oceans are salty. Scientists had believed rivers contributed to the saline content of the seas. Not anymore.

"But they found instead that the compounds flowing into the sea from rivers were different from certain mineral salts that scientists found uniformly throughout the world's oceans. There were chemicals present in the oceans that could not be found in rivers, and vice versa. Now we had finally found the compounds missing from the equations. They were coming from hot springs on the seafloor. In addition to the water cycle on the earth's surface, here was a second kind of water cycle, through the crust--driven not by solar heat and evaporation, but by the earth's own internal heat."

Ballard was a pioneer in untethered submarine vessels. It seems he will never reach his own tether's end. Good for deep-sea exploration.

Barely does the public recover from the shock of a mindless shootout in some school in some part of the country, than it has to contend another outburst of a psychopath in another. No one knows where and when an American lunatic with a gun will enforce her/his unfettered licence to kill next. While the gun control vs gun rights debate rages on, so do mindless killings. If at all, killings could be anything but mindless. So much for the debate.

For those not immersed in the fervent campaigns for either gun control or gun rights, for those caught in the divide -- most circumlocutory contentions made by advocates of either leave them a confused lot. Glenn Utter, chair of the department of political science at Lamar University, provides the fodder for the thought of such individuals. As Utter says, "This book is an attempt to present varying views on gun rights and gun control, treating all sides of the gun control question as fairly and accurately as possible."

Although Utter concentrates on gun control in the United States, several entries examine the experience of other countries like Australia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Statistics show that the homicide rate is much higher in the US, where firearms are easily obtainable, than in England and Wales, where they are not. While the ratio of total homicides in England and Wales against the US was 1 to 8.5 during the 1980-84 period, that of homicides attributed to guns was as high as 1:63.4 and that for handguns alone was as much as 1:174.6.

What everything finally boils down to is the law. More than 40 court cases merit individual entries, the earliest being the Bliss v. Commonwealth case of 1822. Bliss, found in possession of a sword inside a cane, was charged under Kentucky state law with carrying a concealed weapon. Initially fined $100, Bliss appealed against the decision following which a Kentucky state court decision affirmed the individual citizen's right to keep and bear arms as protected in the Kentucky state constitution. The gun still rules.

This not being an encyclopaedia of guns, few firearms and ammunition find mention. The AK-47, Sawed-off Shotgun, Tommy Gun are among the ones that are accorded individual entries. Among those from the firearms industry obviously are the American Firearms Council and the National Association of Federally Licensed Firearms Dealers. The firearms researchers who make it to Utter's volume include Philip Cook, who has conducted extensive research on the link between violence and firearms; and David Hemenway, who conducts research on firearms from a public health perspective.

Historical events like the American Revolution and Colorado Shooting; historical individuals like Samuel Colt and Thomas Jefferson; and historical groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panther Party are not left out. Neither are gun-related publications like the 1.5 million circulation 'American Rifleman'. All the important laws, needless to say, are given due space as do legislators and government officials who have has a role to play.

The bulk of the book goes to groups supporting gun control, groups supporting gun rights and gun control issues. Since the latter is what the book, or rather the issue itself, is what it is all about, the entries classified under 'gun control issues' could have been a bit more elaborate. The argument of gun control lobbyists 'accidents involving guns' loses bit of its sting when one realises that the number of fatal gun accidents in the US actually dropped from 3014 in 1933 to 1225 in 1995.

The compilation of 300-plus cross-referenced entries are not meant to enlighten supporters of either gun rights or gun control. Lay readers, on the other hand, might well make up their mind as to which side of the ideological fissure they should be on. Each entry concludes with a list of further readings, and the book includes a brief chronology of some of the most important events in the history of guns and gun control in the US, appendices of state constitutional provisions, state firearm laws, and organisation addresses, and an index. In other words, quite resourceful.

A person is innocent until proven guilty. But not always. What happens when someone is blameless, but is proven culpable in court and, therefore incorrectly, convicted? Justice delayed may be justice denied, but when a person is wrongly convicted it can only mean something is grossly rotten with the justice system. The more one reads about the trials, tribulations and mortification innocents have been made to go through, the more one wonders how many more were punished for crimes they did not commit before the authors of this book decided to take up the cudgels for the wrongly convicted.

In the Nineties alone, DNA testing has uncovered stone-cold proof that fifty-five completely innocent people were sent to prison and death row in the United States alone. Two dedicated lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld (known for their roles in the OJ Simpson murder trial) under the banner of the New York-based Innocence Project, a civil rights organisation, have been able to free forty-three wrongly convicted persons and are fighting for the cause of more than two hundred others. Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Jim Dwyer covered this courthouse revolution since 1992. The threesome provide a timely sequel to Edward Borchard's 'Convicting the Innocent' (1932). The co-authors have the advances made by science in their favour to argue their case(s): DNA testing can plug many a hole in the legal system.

Together Dwyer, Neufeld and Scheck narrate distressing tales of ten such persons who were convicted either because of shoddy police work, outright dereliction of duty or fabrication of evidence, corrupt prosecutors, jailhouse snitches, mistaken identities, inefficient lawyers, and other usual flaws in the trial system. Many a time, the policemen on the job "nailed" their suspect on hunches and would refuse to admit that their instincts were wrong in the first place even after the accused had been exonerated. An investigator said of a man who had spent seven years in prison: "If he is innocent I wish him a good life, but I will have no remorse for him. I have no remorse for anyone that I have ever arrested." The authors write, "Sometimes, eyewitnesses make mistakes. Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated. Racism trumps the truth. Lab tests are rigged. Defense lawyers sleep. Prosecutors lie." Circumstances could not be more dubious.

Those who ardently believe that the American judicial system is the most just in the world may now reason to argue that even the best may not be good enough. It is not always that only the guilty are put to death. There are many, like those who were acquitted thanks to the relentless efforts of Neufeld and Scheck, escaped death by a whisker. One shudders to conjecture how many -- hundreds? thousands? -- who have been sent to the gallows wrongly. How many murders of innocents have been committed by the law in the name of meting out justice? Wrongs cannot be undone. Dwyer, Neufeld and Scheck do not offer a panacea. They do not enumerate a list of do's. What emerges from the ten harrowing stories are a number of don'ts.

The experiences of the ten people are also tales of redemption: how science and dedicated lawyers expose the flaws in the judicial system and are able to have their "clients" exonerated from the crimes they never committed. The message for judges, prosecutors, policemen, lawyers and lawmakers is plain and simple: do not (wrongly) convict the innocent. There are certain things though that they do not provide answers for: the fact that they themselves derided the DNA evidence in the Simpson trial.

Once the Japanese defences had been breached and the Kwajalein and Eniwetok atolls captured in 1943-44, it paved the way for the invasion of the inner island defences linked by Saipan, Tinian and Guam. These islands were within air-striking distance of Japan and the Central Pacific Drive accorded top priority to the capture of these islands. The battle for Saipan was bloody and pyrrhic in terms of casualties -- 3,225 American soldiers were killed, 13,061 wounded and 326 were reported missing between June 15 and July 9, 1944. The enemy toll was decisively higher: 23,811 confirmed killed.

On June 18, when the fighting was at one of its fiercest, a young private, set to complete 20 in another two months, who had fought as valiantly as it would have been possible, was seriously injured. He was given morphine and was about to be carried away from the battlefield when an explosion blew him off his stretcher. The shelling continued and bodies lay strewn all around. Marines kept on being blown into the air and Japanese soldiers maintained the pressure. The resilient private survived, was rescued and spent the next 13 months in hospital. Best remembered for his action films, Academy Award winner Lee Marvin had played the biggest role of his life long before he made his debut in Hollywood: that of a bellicose marine in World War II.

Marvin received his share of honours and medals, managed to eke out a living after being discharged from hospital with a small disability pension before making his mark as the heavy, rough, tough guy, often a villain, in Hollywood. He won the best actor Oscar for his stellar performance in 'Cat Ballou' in 1965 and went on relive history in the classic war movie 'The Dirty Dozen' two years later. He could not have asked for a better array of co-stars: Robert Ryan was an ex-Marine as was Robert Webber. Ernest Borginine was ex-Navy and Charles Bronson ex-Army.

Marvin's love affair with the Corps lasted all his life. Shortly before his death, he said, "When I see a young Marine in the airport, I think about how this guy is getting his presence together -- that booth camp is doing its job. There's a mettle to him standing in the airport wearing that uniform with his rifle badge. Yeah, I guess I see myself." He chose to be remembered as a Marine and not a star; his headstone was inscribed: "Lee Marvin, PFC, US Marine Corps, World War II, Feb 19 1924 - Aug 29 1987."

Around the time Marvin was recuperating, some 53,000 Marines were in China to back the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. Many served a losing battle against the Communists here. Not everyone with the Marines fought though -- a seventeen-year-old lad who performed guard duties and worked as a telephone lineman and radio announcer there since 1948 did not. Gene Hackman, who served in the Marines till 1954, won his China Service Medal too. It was much later that he went on to become one of Hollywood's greatest stars.

It is not that only ex-Marines would become movie stars. Sterling Hayden, for one, had already acted in films before he realised that he was not in love with the industry. After a disastrous stint with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), Hayden joined the Marines in 1942. The first thing he did was to go by the name of John Hamilton to conceal his movie identity. Hayden fought alongside Marshal Tito's guerrillas, was deeply influenced by the fierce Yugoslav partisans and honoured for his gallantry in the Balkans.

Marvin, Hackman and Hayden are not the only ones who were Marines before they became film personalities or vice versa. Actors like Brian Dennehy, Steve McQueen, Harvey Keitel and John Russel all served in the elite corps. This book is clearly not meant for those with an academic interest either in military history or in movie history. It is not clear who this book is meant for. May neither. Yet to concede it to James Wise and Anne Rehill, their collection of 28 profiles does not make light of either. In fact, the sequel to 'Stars in Blue: Movie Actors in America's Sea Services' should appeal to those who have a little bit of an interest in both. Since it is the individuals who have been written about, movie buffs are the likelier of the two to lap it up. The exploits of most are a revelation.