Casey Kittrell, Jim Kittrell - Down Time: Great Writers on Diving

With Down Time, the Kittrells have achieved something big and wonderful. Divers often struggle to put their experiences into words, but here are the voices of well-known writers who have ventured into the underwater world. They turn diving into a journey of the mind and spirit. This is a diverse, colorful, and ultimately transformative selection of writings on our complex relationship with the sea. --Jean-Michel Cousteau Dave Barry does battle with a lobster...James Jones is awestruck in a coral cathedral...Robert Stone faces down fear with his air running out...Clare Boothe Luce discovers the reef's true treasure...Tim Cahill tracks the zombie of the deep... Dive with some of the best-selling authors of all time. Winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Novelists and journalists. Scientists and adventurers. Playwrights, poets and moviemakers. In thirty-five passages spanning seven decades, they share the frights and fantasies, the mystery and the magic beneath the waves. From the lagoon on Rangiroa to the reefs of the Red Sea...from deep within caves to under the ice...from the lethal silliness of nitrogen narcosis to the elation of soaring over unfathomable depths...every selection, like every dive, is a unique experience. Together, they offer an avid exploration and a thoughtful celebration of a world that only divers know.