Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves

By James Nestor

From the author of the international Bestseller Breath

Covering a diving championship in Greece on a hot and sticky assignment for Outside magazine, James Nestor discovered free diving. He had stumbled on one of the most extreme sports in existence: a quest to extend the frontiers of human experience, in which divers descend without breathing equipment, for hundreds of feet below the water, for minutes after they should have died from lack of oxygen. Sometimes they emerge unconscious, or bleeding from the nose and ears, and sometimes they don't come up at all.

The free divers were Nestor's way into an exhilarating and dangerous world of deep-sea pioneers, underwater athletes, scientists, spear fishermen, billionaires and ordinary men and women who are poised on the brink of some amazing discoveries about the ocean. Soon he was visiting the scientists who live 60ft underwater (and are permanently high on nitrous dioxide), swimming with the notorious man-eating sharks of Réunion and descending thousands of feet in a homemade submarine. And on the way down, he learnt about the amazing amphibious reflexes activated in the human body under deep-water conditions, why dolphins were injected with LSD in an attempt to teach them to talk, and why sharks like AC/DC.

The sea covers seventy per cent of Earth's surface, and still contains answers to questions about the world we are only beginning to ask: Deep blends science and adventure to uncover its amazing secrets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Jun 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781847659064

James Nestor

JAMES NESTOR has written for Outside Magazine, Men's Journal, Dwell Magazine, the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Interior Design, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. His longform piece "Half-Safe," about the only around-the-world journey by land and sea in the same vehicle ever attempted (and completed), was published by The Atavist. Nestor lives in San Francisco and is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.

Reviews for Deep

[kenno82 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Loved the premise of the book, but I think I would’ve enjoyed it more if it just stuck to a single narrative, rather than mixing up so many themes.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a very good book on a topic I knew nothing about, free diving. It's up there with free climbing for extreme craziness. Nestor is a reporter for Outside but he decides to learn how to do it himself and that brings the book to a new level. He travels around the world to cool places and meets interesting people, recounts some harrowing stories. And shows this "sport" was once common among native people who searched for food in the sea. And there it occurred to me: this is Christopher McDougall's Born to Run. Instead of running in bare feet without shoes, it's deep diving without scuba gear. There is the connection with primitive people, rediscovering an ancient power that exists latent in us all if we give up the technology. It says something that we find these types of activities and books so alluring.

[bdtrump · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A thorough yet concise account of human activity at differing depths underwater, and the technologies/interactions that make it possible. Nestor has a gift with making even those with no experience or knowledge of the world's oceans fall entranced with what's out there - from the relatively simple to the mostly unknown. A fabulous yet short work, this will be a rewarding read for virtually anyone, and will instill a sense of wonder at the complex yet symbiotic relationship that humans have had with waters worldwide.