Although Cousteau's newer books are fascinating to read, they do not strike immediate fire as [The Silent World] does. The beginning paragraph, when the author and his friends unpack the first aqualung, captures the reader's attention at once, and the interest never wanes. Here is all the excitement of science fiction along with the reality of the here and now. Here is a high-spirited, adventure-packed, personal narrative of undersea salvage, scientific research, and exploration in the Mediterranean. With the aqualungs (of which Cousteau was co-inventor) he and his men dived nearly naked into pressures that have crushed submarines. Cousteau describes what it is like to be a "manfish" swimming with sharks, mantas, and octopuses. The dives made by the Undersea Research Group to locate and explore wrecks (some had sunk during World War II and one went down about 80 B.C.) taught them a lot about work at...