The Conquest of the Ocean: The Illustrated History of Seafaring by Brian Lavery

I know absolutely nothing about ships or sailing, and this book was entertaining, informative, well illustrated and nice to hold.  Lavery works chronologically through the history of sailing from the premodern times right up to the present day.

The book is divided into 5 sections:
The First Ocean Sailors to 1850 (Arabs, Vikings, Polynesians, Chinese, Pilgrims, Greeks and Romans);
The Age of Exploration 1450-1600 (European journeys to the Americas, first cirumnavigation of the Earth, Drake, Columbus, Amerigo and medieval ships);
The Age of Empire 1600-1815 (Colonialism, piracy, the slave trade, Cook, Trafalgar and whaling);
Steam and Emigration 1815-1915 (early steamships, American emigration, Chinese and Japanese trade, Clipper ships, submarines, liners and battleships);
The Wars on the Oceans 1914-1945 (World War I and World War II, Jutland, Midway, Atlantic, D-Day, U-boats)
The Global Ocean 1945-present (containers, Cuban Missile crisis, birth of oceanography, Falklands, ocean racing, oil spills, modern piracy)

Each section is illustrated with excellent maps showing the information such as main trade routes, winds, currents, shipwrecks, iceberg zones and battles although sometimes the colours are a hard to distinguish.  There are drawings of the ships spoken about in the text, and usefully page numbers given for cross references.  The maps are mostly accurate, although according to the Battle of the Atlantic one The Hood was sunk nearer Greenland than Scapa Flow!  However, in general the book is generously illustrated, ephermera, paintings, photographs, quotations and facts on almost every page that bring the subject alive.

Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing by Calum Roberts

This is a clarion call to action by a Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York.  Much of his prose is a slow read because he writes as a scientist, there are few quick soundbites, just a mountain of evidence with regard to how the seas have changed since humans evolved.  He takes us through all the science of oceanography and marine biology, winds and currents, tides, deoxygenation, dead zones, disease and marine farming, history, acidity and warming with remarkably little repetition.

Roberts begins at the beginning, with our impact as hunter gatherers, and moves through industrialisation and mechanisation showing how our methods of using the seas, both as a source for food and as a sink for our waste, have grown exponentially over the past 200 years.  The seas are not as visible to the lay person as land and the effects of global warming upon them have been less obvious, but they are now becoming more so as the sea warms, the ice caps melt, the water becomes more acidic, areas of deoxygenated water grow and the stresses the seas are placed under are exacerbated by human needs for food.

The science Roberts lays out from multiple sources demonstrates the untenability of claims of climate change, but remarkably this book is not a gloomy one.  Roberts is a scientist and as such he gives the fully balanced view.  He demonstrates there are many unknowns, that life within the seas is evolving  and the ways in which the marine environment ultimately evolves is unknown and may be of benefit, but that the problem may well be that humans will not survive the changes they have wrought.  Roberts works with many marine conservation agencies and believes that conscientious stewardship of the sea is both possible and beginning to take place.

A worthwhile task to read, thoroughly educating and well balanced, and you will never look at the seas in the same way again.