A Silent Spring for oceans, written by "the Rachel Carson of the fish world" (The New York Times)

In THE OCEAN OF LIFE, Roberts explores the devastation of the mighty Mississippi and the Chesapeake Bay, the deathly upwellings in Oregon, the toxic seaweed that is taking over beaches in Seattle, the red tides in Florida, the invasive species threatening the Great Lakes and the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. We have all read stories about overfishing and global warming, about melting icecaps and dying penguins, about the problematic side effects of pesticides and plastics and fertilizers and industrial pollution. Anyone who loves to fish will have noticed that the waters are changing, and that it is harder to find the big fish that one could regularly reel in as recently as 30 years ago. In this book, Roberts pulls together these disparate strands to tell the story of the sea.