Book Review: Into the Great Wide ocean by Sonke Johnsen 2.5/3 stars

  I read Into the Great Wide Ocean  by Sonke Johnsen  as part of my 2025 Water reading! 

  I - errr- did not love it. I do think however, it's a book for a certain population. 

Dr. Johnsen describes life in the water column of the open sea, an area that is not studied as frequently as areas closer to shore. This is interspersed with stories about how he got started in marine biology and how his career unfolded. 

   I was super excited when the audio book finally came off hold and I dove in rapidly. Johnsen has a bit of a folksy style  and did a fairly good job at interspersing amusing stories from his life at sea and on shore with facts and findings about the deep ocean. Frequently, however, the author's passion for the topic did go fairly deep into the physics of things and as a casual reader I was a bit lost. I can see that if I attended a lecture with Dr. Johnsen as the speaker, I would highly enjoy it, but as a reader, the pages and pages of discussion of some of the drier aspects of things did find me tuning out a bit. So, I personally would not pick this one up again, I suspect Dr. Johnsen would have had a best seller if he had partnered with an author like Susan Casey  who makes her living off sort of translating complex ideas into lay-people understanding. 

That said - If this was a text book for a class I was taking, I would LOVE it.  It brings this part of the ocean to life in a way that a text book typically does not, and it did encourage me to start asking more and more questions about the topics at hand.  If I was a person with a bit of a stronger interest in this topic, I suspect I also would have loved it slightly more.  If I had a teen aged cousin/niece/nephew interested in marine biology, this would be on their gift list. If I ran a book club on the natural world, it might make it to the club list.  For me, I do not do any of those things, so, I was glad to have read and learned some more things about the ocean, and I was also glad to hit the return button for the library. 

So if you fit the bill, this will probably be a great read for you! 

STATS

First Published : October 2024 

Pages: 248

Available as an Audio Book : YES

Trigger Warnings: Oceanic accidents,Sea-sickness,