The Remarkable Life of William Beebe sat on my shelf for more than a year before I picked it up. The truth is I wasn't that interested. While Beebe had been a childhood hero of mine, that status was based solely on his exploits as the first deep-sea explorer. But his life had been much more than that and unlike the other recent Beebe book, Descent, The Remarkable Life takes it all into account -- his career as a world-renowned ornithologist, a naturalist extraordinaire, prolific best-selling author and mentor to countless young scientists eager to follow in his footsteps. Despite my lack of interest in any of these subject areas, though, I gave it a shot.

I'm glad I did. The picture that emerges of Beebe is indeed a remarkable one. He starts life as a young boy obsessed with collecting, categorizing and understanding the wildlife around him, and then carries that obsession with him straight through the next eighty-plus years in a single-minded pursuit of knowledge that sharpens, but never varies. And all that stuff I was wasn't interested in ... well, it was pretty interesting.

The key point for me, though, and for anyone principally interested in Beebe as an ocean explorer, is that The Remarkable Life puts it all into context. We see that Beebe didn't just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields from ornithology to marine biology. He had gone on numerous expeditions to study tropical birds, each of which began and ended with a long ocean voyage. During those voyages,

We see also how his study of wildlife evolved from the Victorian model of looking at each animal species in a vaccuum, removed from its environment, to a wholistic approach taking it all into account -- the weather, the seasons, its competitors for food and mates, its predators and prey, etc. Rather than making a simple study of birds in a rainforest, he mapped out a quarter-mile square in that forest to study the inter-relationships of everything in it from the ground up to the tree canopy. At a time when the rest of the scientific world was beginning to prize specialization, Beebe was, of neccessity, casting his own observational net wider and wider. It's only natural that he found no barriers preventing him from moving his field of study from the forests to the oceans and then back again.

Beyond that, we see Beebe's own extraordinary social life, in which he counted among his friends and acquaintences the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Hepburn, and A.A. Milne, to name just a few. He was also among the first of his or any generation to encourage the women around him to pursue their own scientific studies and both of his wives had successful writing careers of their own. He truly was a man ahead of his time.

The Remarkable Life captures all of this and more. It doesn't examine his adventures in the bathysphere to the same degree of detail that Descent does, and nor should it. But it's no exageration to say that it does put everything in Descent into a whole new prespective. The Remarkable Life of William Beebe is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it. It was published by Island Press in 2004.

Jerry Shine