Ocean
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Ocean
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Steve Mentz
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today’s deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience.
From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.©2020 Steve Mentz (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Steve Mentz’s Ocean is both a lyrical and scholarly ode to the sea, encrusting and fluid.
Oceans are big things, so Steve Mentz has made a concise book of them. From sailors as cyborgs to Queequeg as a mermaid, from Conrad's mirrored sea to Emily Dickinson's marine visions, Mentz swims like Coleridge's library cormorant, collecting glittering things. The result is a wild and wonderful work; part essay, part reverie, wholly full of watery brilliance.
Ocean: a tiny word, but an expansive ecology made fathomable by Mentz's exploration of the human attraction to and fear of the world's oceans as illuminated through poetry, history, and literature. A wondrous read.
Mentz takes us on an invigorating 'adventure in thinking,' across vast temporalities and aquatic expanses, rich with strange confluences, and haunted by the terrors of 'wet globalization.' Against the impossibility of understanding the ocean, he casts an inventive blue humanities that lures us with its histories, poetry, theories, queer couplings, exultations, and immersive practices.
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