It is difficult to criticize anything with Jacques Cousteau's name on it, especially a book as beautiful to look at as ["The Ocean World"]. Captain Cousteau has done more than anyone else to educate people about their "water planet." He has been a buoyant, indefatigable scout of the saltwater world, and through his films of his underwater adventures he has invited us to come along with him. (p. 12)

For the past several years, Captain Cousteau has been dashing about the globe, ringing the tocsin. In "The Ocean World" he sounds the alarm yet again: "Now the crisis is at hand. This is not the raving of a placard-carrying doomsayer, but the observation of thousands of learned and concerned individuals. I am 100 percent pessimistic when I predict some sort of a disaster, for it will surely come."

Since he cannot accept the resignation that such pessimism implies, however, he...