Ocean Country

July 20, 2015
In this earnest and elegiac volume, Cunningham (Talking Politics) describes her long relationship with the ocean, including her early experiences “surfing in a whitewater kayak” and her later work with conservation groups around the world. When Cunningham moved from New York City to the West Coast decades ago, she considered California “ocean country.” Over time she realized that the term encompassed the “entire planet,” as the seas are “critical to each and every form of life on earth.” Here, she offers both personal and professional perspectives, for example railing against the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico and British Petroleum’s “blithe understatement of the scope of the crisis.” That disaster’s grave and tremendous effects on marine life—birds, sea turtles, dolphins, and whales—has rippled far and wide. Likening oceans to “water gardens,” Cunningham encourages people to be more careful in how they treat them, reasoning that nobody would throw “motor oil or untreated sewage or the contents of a garbage can” into their home garden. With genuine emotion and great pragmatism, Cunningham makes passionate pleas for the continued health of the planet.

June 15, 2015
A complex narrative of how journalist Cunningham (Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age, 1995) overcame despair through her conservation efforts. In the mid-1990s, the author was recovering from a near-death experience after her whitewater kayak had been overturned by a rogue wave, rendering her temporarily unconscious. In the aftermath, she suffered problems with numbness in her body, debilitating pain, and the onset of an autoimmune disorder. For her, surfing in ocean water had been "her happy holiday," a place where she experienced a profound connection to nature. After her accident, it was also the scene of her brush with death. To overcome her fear, she began training as a divemaster, but her health continued to deteriorate. In an effort to recuperate, she booked a diving trip to a group of islands off the coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The trip was glorious, but she became aware that this paradise was being threatened by pollution, that the seemingly invulnerable ocean was "much more vulnerable than it appeared." Taking stock of the many ways in which humans were damaging the oceans-climate change, pollution, toxic chemicals, overfishing, oil spills, and others-Cunningham began to travel to oceans in other parts of the world, where she witnessed the destruction of coral reefs and vegetation that provide protection for shelter fish and other ocean dwellers. At first, the author was in despair. For her, the ocean had been a refuge and playground. Now her eyes were opened to the enormity of the threat. "I'd known about all of this for years," she writes, "but it had been 'information.' Now it was visceral, witnessed: I was horrified." Cunningham regained her strength by joining the growing community of caring people around the world who are fighting to preserve our oceanic heritage, and she ably conveys her enthusiasm to readers. A moving testament to the human spirit.

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September 1, 2015
Cunningham was always a water lover, but it took a life-altering accident for her to discover the extent of the trouble our oceans are in. Nearly paralyzed from riding a rogue wave, Cunningham initially decided to return to her nemesis as a way of achieving closure. An expedition to the Turks and Caicos Islands was meant to be healing, but it delivered a different kind of epiphany. Cunningham was shocked to observe the extent of the coral bleaching that was underway. Climate change hit home. Sinking into further despair, Cunningham did eventually realize that even one individual can be an agent of change in reversing some of the catastrophe's more serious effects. Even if her navel-gazing is occasionally overwrought, Cunningham's earnest narration of travels to remote seas around the world is a compelling read. Citing examples of sustainable fisheries and marine-protected areas, the book ends on the hopeful note that we may have stopped hitting the snooze button when it comes to taking action against climate change.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)