I must digress for a moment to say that of all of the perks associated with working for a magazine, I love the books we get in for review the most. People just send us books: it’s like manna from heaven! Mind you, not all of the books are really suited for review by a dive magazine. Take Amelia Earharts’s Shoes (Updated Edition), which came in a month or so ago. It’s the story behind The International Group for Historical Aircraft Discovery (TIGHAR)’s search to positively determine the fate the 1930’s flyer Amelia Earhart. Earhart, you might recall, took off with her navigator from an airstrip in Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, on one of the last legs of their trans-global flight, never to be seen again. The book cover hints at much: “Is the Mystery Solved?” it teases. The story follows TIGHAR as it weaves a complicated web of hypotheses and research, which eventually leads the group to make several expeditions to the island of Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Chain. Here many oddities are discovered, not the least of which is a woman’s shoe of American manufacture and contemporary to Earhart’s time. It’s an interesting book, but unless you count the coconut crabs, the diving component of its 400-odd pages (including a huge bibliography and copious notes) consists of two photos and a couple of paragraphs on the survey done on SCUBA on the first trip in 1989, and another photo and a map with a passing reference to an abortive sonar survey done by Oceaneering International on an expedition in 1991. In total, the diving content amounts to less than a half a dozen pages, and to get that many you have to include all of the photographs as well as a song about sharks set to the tune of “It Had to be You”: not much for a dive magazine to set its teeth into. Would I recommend the book? Definitely - if you like history or a mystery you’ll really enjoy it. Would I recommend it for the diving? No way – diving is not what this book is about, not even peripherally. The descriptions of the diving are superficial (“the divers surveyed the reef face down to 100 feet and more”), the underwater photos are amateurish, and the shark song is… well, the word “tedious” comes to mind.

Which brings me back to my original thought: we can’t even talk about Amelia Earhart in this magazine without mentioning sharks! This has got to stop! But then Sharks of the World came along and, frankly, I was impressed. I am not by nature a biology-minded person – I’m a historian – and field guides don’t normally stir my blood. But as I was preparing to pass this one off to Phil, who usually bags all of the book reviews around here, I thumbed through the pages. This was interesting. It was well-written. It presented basic information (biology, behaviour, history of interaction with people, research, conservation) simply and thoroughly, and this was just the introduction! There were beautiful colour plates and well-ordered, sensible listings. This book grabbed me, and (as I think we’ve established) I’m not ‘into’ sharks! So I sat down and read it – admittedly, not every single entry, but the introductory section (50 pages on the life and times of sharks) and I learned a number of things. I went through the colour plates and looked up the species I’ve come across in the past. Then I looked up a few others, just because they seemed nifty. I found the guide easy to use and the descriptions good (for a field guide – as always, if you want very specific information on an individual species, you’ll need to go to a specialized reference book). Recognizing that I’m not a biologist, I passed the guide over to a friend, whose impressions confirmed mine: it’s easy to use, full of information, and makes you want to read more.  Now, I don’t honestly think it’s the type of book you’d read cover to cover – does anyone ever with a field guide? But if you did, you’d find almost every single shark species: Sharks of the World is the first comprehensive field guide to cover over 450 species of shark. (The guide explains, almost apologetically, that there are another 50 or so “poorly known, undescribed species, which could not be illustrated and described here, that bring the number up to about 500” in total.) The authors, Leonard Compagno, Marc Dando and Sarah Fowler, are leading authorities on the subject, so you can trust the source of information. This is a reference anyone in any age group or level of knowledge could use easily. You don’t need to be a shark fan for Sharks of the World to be a useful addition to your library: this is one book I’d recommend to any diver or naturalist any day.

Sharks of the World
By Leonard Compagno, Marc Dando and Sarah Fowler

Princeton University Press

January 2005

ISBN 0-691-12072-2

368 pages, 500 line illustrations, 128 colour plates and 500 maps

US$29.95 (prices in Canada depend on the bookseller: about C$42)    

Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved?(Updated Edition)

By Thomas F. King, Randall Jacobson, Karen Ramey Burns, and Kenton Spading

AltaMira Press

January 2005

ISBN 0-7591-0131-0

448 pages

US $19.95  C$24.39(Amazon)