Deep

During a hot and stuffy assignment for Outside magazine, where he reported on a diving championship in Greece, James Nestor discovered freediving. He had stumbled upon one of the most extreme sports: a quest for the limits of human experience, where divers plunge hundreds of feet underwater without breathing apparatus and remain submerged for minutes, despite being on the brink of suffocation. Sometimes they surface unconscious or bleeding from their noses and ears, and sometimes they do not resurface at all. The freedivers were Nestor's gateway to an exciting and dangerous world of deep-sea pioneers, underwater athletes, scientists, spear fishermen, billionaires, and ordinary men and women on the verge of remarkable discoveries about the ocean. Soon, he visited scientists living 60 feet underwater and constantly under the influence of nitrous oxide, swam with the infamous man-eating sharks of Rion, and dove thousands of feet deep in a homemade submarine. On the way down, he learned about the astonishing amphibious reflexes activated in the human body under deep-water conditions, why dolphins were injected with LSD to teach them to speak, and why sharks like AC/DC. The sea covers seventy percent of the Earth's surface and still holds answers to questions about the world we are just beginning to ask: Deep connects science and adventure to reveal its astonishing secrets.