Even without the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, award-winning Mother Jones journalist Julia Whitty's eloquent Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) would be timely and vital. The author of an earlier book, The Fragile Edge, which received the John Burroughs Medal (foremost nature writing award), the PEN/USA Award, and the Kiriyama Prize, she draws on her thirty years of work as a diver and documentary filmmaker to report on the humbling, awe-inspiring encounters one has in the depths of the oceans. "Mingling mythology and science, Whitty pulls readers into the water depths of the oceans, home to the birds, whales and other mysterious creatures that have been her lifetime passion ... This luminous prose is disturbed by accompanying reports of human-induced damage of oceanic ecosystems, where 'market economics relentlessly drives commercially desirable species towards extinction' like a modern plague, exemplified by the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, which caused a 'trophic cascade' transforming all aspects of the ecosystem 'from crab to zooplankton to phytoplankton to nitrates.'" - Publishers Weekly.