The Sea Around Usby Rachel Carson
The classic natural history in a 1961 update, with footnotes, introduction and an afterword. The introduction was by Ann H. Zwinger; the afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton. It doesn't say who wrote the footnotes so I assume it was Rachel Carson herself.
This is the kind of book that taught me to love natural history writing long, long ago. A 2014 rewrite would be cool. Some things never change--wind, water and waves--but our understanding of them does. It would be a different book today...but not so different as to render this one pointless.
Does my admiration for this lovely, lovely book give me a right to gripe, just a little? It was published by Oxford University Press. I don't know if it's their fault or the author's (when in doubt, blame the publisher), but the whole 243 page volume contains exactly one illustration. There may have been two but I don't think so. One measly little map! It should have had a hundred. No map of Pangaea--no diagram of wave motion--nary an illustration of undersea volcanoes or the moon-sun alignment that causes spring tides. That last fact NEVER made sense to me until I saw a drawing of it. So why not here?
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