Zusatztext The sensational exploits of Beebe and Barton and the bathysphere kept Americans on the edges of their seats in the 1930s! and! as Brad Matsen proves in Descent ! they can still deliver a thrill. The New York Times Captivating. . . . A worthy tribute to [Barton and Beebe's] remarkable achievement. Nature [Matsen is a] master storyteller. . . . You'll be well rewarded in reading this work. Decatur Daily Informationen zum Autor Brad Matsen Klappentext In Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss! Brad Matsen brings to vivid life the famous deep-sea expeditions of Otis Barton and William Beebe. Beebe was a very well-connected and internationally acclaimed naturalist! with the power to generate media attention. Barton was an engineer and heir to a considerable fortune! who had long dreamed of making his mark on the world as an adventurer. Together! Beebe and Barton would achieve what no one had done before--direct observation of life in the blackness of the abyss. Here! against the back drop of the depression! is their riveting tale. One BARTON When Otis Barton told the story, he always said it began and very nearly ended on Thanksgiving Day in 1926, when he went for a walk to buy a newspaper. He left his third-floor apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan and turned toward Madison Avenue, loping along lost in thought. Barton was preoccupied that morning with a recurring fantasy in which he was a celebrated explorer just back from a dangerous adventure, with photographs and specimens of creatures never before seen by man, resting between expeditions in a penthouse apartment with a weeping willow on the terrace, a beautiful girl who liked camping and looked good in a pith helmet by his side. Like other boys enchanted by the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and the other fantasists who were so popular during his childhood, Barton had feasted on daydreams of wild animals, caves filled with gold, and lost civilizations. As a young man of twenty-six, the theater of his imagination was still as vivid to him as the pavement beneath his feet. In the real world, though, Otis Barton was an engineering student at Columbia University, the grandson of a merchant who had started with a clapboard storefront in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1850, sold dry goods, and prospered. Otis Barton's father, Frederick, went to Harvard, made a small fortune as a textile mill salesman during the boom years just before the turn of the century, and moved his family to New York, where business was even better. His first son, Frederick Otis Barton, Jr., was born there on June 5, 1899, followed by two daughters, Ellen and Mary, and a second son, Francis. Frederick Barton died suddenly in 1905heart attacks ran in the familyand his wife, the former Mary Lowell Coolidge, packed up her children and moved first to Concord, Massachusetts, and then to a house on Marlborough Street in Boston. Mary Barton's relatives and social circle included the Lowells, Cabots, and Coolidges, who had built their fortunes in railroads, manufacturing, and finance as coal, steam, and cheap labor drove the engines of the Industrial Revolution. Her marriage to Frederick Barton had been considered shrewd by family patriarchs, who correctly assumed that merchants would capture a significant share of the money pouring into the pockets of mill and factory workers as mass consumption became a predictable part of the economic equation. After Mary returned to Boston as a widow with her share of the Barton inheritance and her own small fortune, she settled her family into the proven aristocratic pattern of fall and winter in the city, spring traveling abroad, and summers on Vineyard Sound. Otis Barton had been raised by women. His mother, her sisters, and a devoted nurse, Ka...

Autorentext
Bradford Matsen has been writing about the sea and its inhabitants for twenty-five years in books, film scripts, essays, and magazine articles. Among his books are Planet Ocean: A Story of Life the Sea, and Dancing to the Fossil Record; Shocking Fish Tales; and Fishing Up North, and he is the author of the award-winning Incredible Ocean Adventure series for children. He was a creative producer for the Shape of Life, an eight-hour National Geographic/Sea Studios television series on evolution that aired on PBS in April 2002, and wrote the accompanying book of the same name. Matsen has written on marine science and environmental topics for Mother Jones, Audubon, Natural History, and many other magazines. His coverage of depleted ocean resources in Mother Jones, "Blues In the Key of Sea," won the Project Censored Award as one of the ten best stories of 1999. His essays have been included in Book of the Tongass as part of the influential Literature for a Land Ethic series, the Smithsonian Institution's Ocean Planet, and other anthologies. He lives in Seattle and New York.

Klappentext

In Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss, Brad Matsen brings to vivid life the famous deep-sea expeditions of Otis Barton and William Beebe. Beebe was a very well-connected and internationally acclaimed naturalist, with the power to generate media attention. Barton was an engineer and heir to a considerable fortune, who had long dreamed of making his mark on the world as an adventurer. Together, Beebe and Barton would achieve what no one had done before--direct observation of life in the blackness of the abyss. Here, against the back drop of the depression, is their riveting tale.

Leseprobe
One
BARTON

When Otis Barton told the story, he always said it began and very nearly ended on Thanksgiving Day in 1926, when he went for a walk to buy a newspaper. He left his third-floor apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan and turned toward Madison Avenue, loping along lost in thought. Barton was preoccupied that morning with a recurring fantasy in which he was a celebrated explorer just back from

a dangerous adventure, with photographs and specimens of creatures never before seen by man, resting between expeditions in a penthouse apartment with a weeping willow on the terrace, a beautiful girl who liked camping and looked good in a pith helmet by his side. Like other boys enchanted by the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and the other fantasists who were so popular during his childhood, Barton had feasted on daydreams of wild animals, caves filled with gold, and lost civilizations. As a young man of twenty-six, the theater of his imagination was still as vivid to him as the pavement beneath his feet.

In the real world, though, Otis Barton was an engineering student at Columbia University, the grandson of a merchant who had started with a clapboard storefront in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1850, sold dry goods, and prospered. Otis Barton’s father, Frederick, went to Harvard, made a small fortune as a textile mill salesman during the boom years just before the turn of the century, and moved his family to New York, where business was even better. His first son, Frederick Otis Barton, Jr., was born there on June 5, 1899, followed by two daughters, Ellen and Mary, and a second son, Francis. Frederick Barton died suddenly in 1905—heart attacks ran in the family—and his wife, the former Mary Lowell Coolidge, packed up her children and moved first to Concord, Massachusetts, and then to a house on Marlborough Street in Boston.

Mary Barton’s relatives and social circle included the Lowells, Cabots, and Coolidges, who had built their fortunes in railroads, manufacturing, and finance as coal, steam, and cheap labor drove the engines of the Industrial Revolution. Her marriage to Frederick Barton had been considered shrewd by family patriarchs, who correctly assumed that merchants would capture a significant share of the money pouring into the pockets of mill and factory workers as mass consumption became a predictable part of the economi…