In this wonderfully wide-ranging volume, Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra have given us a fine collection of maritime riches. From reflections on the ocean as metaphor to shark documentaries and Jaws, from Hemingway's organic ecology to Melville's tropic-birds and the establishment of a Puerto Rican maritime preserve, This Watery World reminds us that-onshore and inland-we are all in the grip of our images and interactions with the sea. When I put this book down I was reminded of the Hyderabadi poet Sarojini Naidu: The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all. -Professor Ashton Nichols, editor of Romantic Natural Histories and author of The Poetics of Epiphany and The Revolutionary I