A Jeremiad for our time

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, overviews, critiques, capitalism, slave trade, colonialism

When I saw the title Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, by James Bradley, I expected a scientific or technical compendium of some sort. Far from it. The subject is indeed the ocean, more particularly what the human race has done to it. It isn't pretty. And there is a lot of it, more than 380 pages, plus 44 pages of endnotes (I read endnotes only if there is more substance to them than references or sources).

Each of the thirteen chapters focuses on an aspect of the ocean. That makes for rather long chapters. The author has compiled a great mass of information in each case, but the bulk of a typical chapter is a diatribe upon the various capitalistic ills. To Mr. Bradley, the much-used terms "violent colonialism" and "capitalistic violence" and variations thereof are redundancies. Eventually it seemed to me a pale shadow of the book of Lamentations.

One might hope the author has solutions for past and ongoing ills, be they overexploitation or slavery or pollution. Nope. Fortunately, he does tell us of a number of initiatives and projects by those who seek to mitigate them. This is a book of complaints.

I could have stopped early, but I decided to let the man have his say. He appears to be balanced on a knife edge between two proverbs I've seen attributed to Winston Churchill: "Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others," and "Man is uniquely capable of finding an optimum solution to any problem, but only after exhausting all other options." I am not sure I would label the author a Socialist, but he is clearly anti-Capitalistic.

I know he wants to motivate the public in some way, or in several ways. He hasn't the knack.