Full Fathom Five: Ocean Warming and a Father's Legacy
Veteran journalist Chaplin’s previous memoir, Dark Wind (1999), about a harrowing ocean voyage that killed his lover and sailing partner, was acclaimed for its searing honesty and luminous prose. Here, Chaplin returns for a very different kind of personal reckoning that combines a biography of his colorful, adventurous father with a scientific study of the current deteriorating health of Caribbean reefs. As a boy growing up in the Bahamas during the 1950s, Chaplin accompanied his father, Charles, on underwater dives to catalog the abundant variety of sea life, a project resulting in the landmark book Fishes of the Bahamas (1968), still used today by marine biologists. When fish curators from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences asked Chaplin to help conduct an updated census of the waters around his childhood home, the author eagerly agreed. In combining cherished recollections of his upbringing by a playboy turned scientist father with revelations from the academy’s diving team about climate change–related underwater ­devastation, Chaplin sounds a very distinctive environmental warning that will affect his readers on many levels. --Carl Hays