A01=Ian Jack
Author_Ian Jack
Category=DNL
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780903141161
- Weight: 350g
- Dimensions: 148 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 03 Apr 1998
- Publisher: Granta Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
We came from the sea, and we would be nothing without it. Without the sea, no clouds, no rain, no rivers, no life. Seven-tenths of the world's surface is sea. We play at its edges, we put down nets and feed from it, we send cargo across its ruffling surface. And yet it remains the wildest, strangest and least-known part of the planet: a puzzle. Science knows more about the surface of the moon than it does about the ocean floor (somewhere between ten million and a hundred million unclassified species live there; science has still to find out). We do not quite know how the sea works. Is it rising? Warming? How much pollution can it take? How many of its island states will disappear?
The sea is the natural arena for adventure, mystery and catastrophe (the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, the Titanic, El Niño). But air has replaced water as the transporting element of the twentieth century, and the sea has been retreating in the imaginations of the West.
For too long we have turned out backs to it.
Ian Jack edited Granta from 1995 to 2007, having previously edited the Independent on Sunday. He has written on many subjects, including the Titanic, Kathleen Ferrier, the Hatfield train crash and the three members of the IRA active-service unit who were killed on Gibraltar. He is the editor of The Granta Book of Reportage and The Granta Book of India, and the author of a collection of journalism, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. He is working, not very quickly, on a book about the River Clyde.
