The Bathysphere Book

 
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
by Brad Fox
Astra

2023 
 
 
I think there's some value in allowing your friends' interests to influence you. At one time, my sister was very interested in oceanography, so I still like to read about it from time to time. The Bathysphere Book is a history of the first really successful deep-sea diving vehicle, the bathysphere, and a biography of the explorer who rode in it, William Beebe.
 
The bathysphere was built by Otis Barton. When the door was screwed on, it was a hermetically sealed metal sphere, with only three quartz windows to see out. It was raised and lowed by a metal cable, and this was paired with a phone line so Beebe could report what he saw up to his research partner (and girlfriend) Gloria Hollister for transcription. The bathysphere carried its own compressed oxygen, had internal air conditioning, and used a chemical reactant to neutralize the carbon dioxide its occupants exhaled. It was only used a few times, mainly in 1933 and 1934, and Hollister never got to go on a real dive. Bebee and seasick Barton dove together each time, with Barton not even looking out, just monitoring the machines.
 
The purpose of the dives was to find out what the ocean was actually like, below the depths you could reach in diving helmet. As you descend, more and more light is absorbed by the water above you, first reds and oranges, then yellows and greens. Before it becomes black, the ocean glows blue-violet. Many of the deep sea creatures are also partially bioluminescent. There is more life down there than scientists had believed possible before Beebe's dives.
 
The other famous collaborator on this project was artist Else Bostelmann. She also never dove in the bathysphere, and based all her paintings on Hollister's transcripts and direct conversation with Beebe. I actually got this book because I'd seen some of Bostelmann's fantastically dark, haunting watercolors before. My favorite anecdote is that on a few occasions, she donned a diving helmet, dropped a canvas and a metal music stand, and was actually able to oil paint fish and coral, from life, at a depth of 20 or 30 feet.
 

Previously Unknown Dragonfish Circling the Bathysphere 
- Else Bostlemann, 1934

 
There are some things from the past that I guess I assumed were more widespread than they actually were. When I watched the film The Automat, I was genuinely surprised to learn there were really only ever in New York and Philadelphia. The bathysphere was unique, not the name for a general type of craft, and outside of Beebe's handful of deep dives in the early 30s, was really only used for test dives and exhibitions.
 
Fox writes in very short chapters that each relay a single thought or incident. His narratives of Beebe's life and the story of the bathysphere dives are interwoven with Bostelmann's sketches and paintings, photos of the expeditions, excerpts from Beebe's and Hollister's diaries, excerpts from the transcripts of the dives and descriptions of the undersea sightings, accounts of what else was going on historically at the same time, and then lots and lots of short biographical sketches of other people tangentially (often very tenuously) connected to Beebe and the dives. So we learn about the famous racist Beebe dedicated one of his books to, but also about Beebe's neighbor's doctor. Who indeed sounds like a fascinating fellow! The proliferation of chapters about people with only the thinnest of connections to the dives is probably meant to help provide context, but also kind of made it feel like Fox didn't really have enough material to fill a book and was padding it out.

Short Life in a Strange World

 
 
Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

Fourth Estate

2020

 

 

Usually I finish my first book of the year a bit faster than this, but 2025 has been off to a rough start. Car trouble, a broken dishwasher that replaces my leisure time with housework, extra tasks at work, recovering from being sick myself, worrying over a sick relative. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the rest of the world outside my house isn't doing so well either.
 

Short Life in a Strange World is an account of author Toby Ferris's personal quest to see all the remaining paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that exist in the world. There are 42 such paintings, and all but one are in public museums. Ferris started this project the year he turned 42, the same age that Bruegel died.
 

Short Life is a mix of things. It's structured by Ferris's trips. The prologue tells us how he got started, the epilogue takes place after he finished, and each of the dozen chapters covers one trip, where he usually visited several museums, often in more than one country. Ferris talks about the logistics of the trips, about the specific paintings he saw on each one. He talks about Bruegel's life and painting techniques; he talks about specific details and recurring themes in Bruegel's art. Ferris tells us about his own life, his brother, who is also an author, his dead father, who left behind a few sparsely completed diaries when he died. This is all blended and interwoven, and though at times the mix contains (to my mind) too much Ferris and not enough Bruegel, I generally liked the way he integrated all this material, the way a single detail in a painting would require a bit of history about the 16th century Netherlands, and relate to an incident in Bruegel's life, and remind Ferris of something his father did when he was younger.
 

 

Dulle Griet via Wikimedia

 

The Triumph of Death via Wikimedia

 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Wikimedia

  

 
Before reading Short Life, my most vivid images of Bruegel were probably his apocalyptic paintings, scenes where early modern warfare mingled with scenes of Christian eschatology, like Dulle Griet, The Triumph of Death, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels. These images are sometimes falsely attributed to fellow Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But many more of Bruegel's paintings are scenes of peasant life, like Children's Games or The Wedding Dance, and they often depict winter, like The Census at Bethlehem.
 

 

Children's Games via Wikimedia

 

The Wedding Dance via Wikimedia

 

The Census at Bethlehem via Wikimedia

  

 
This is what Bruegel is best known for - his dense, detailed paintings of the communal aspects of village life, often blending realism with allegorical meaning, often including those at the margins of peasant life, the poor, beggars, people with injuries or disabilities, children.
 
Bruegel lived during a time of dramatic change, as Europe was convulsed by the effects of the Gutenberg printing press and the arrival of new goods from the Americas, as leaders sent soldiers and mercenaries to slaughter and burn in the name of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel's legacy was also spread by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who used sketches inherited from his father to paint copies that now far outnumber the originals.
 
Ferris is a person who likes numbers, and seemingly doesn't really like other people. He hates crowds, and on most of his trips, the route from the airport to the museum was all the sightseeing he did. He made a spreadsheet to track his project, and he talks about it far, FAR too much. He calculated the total square footage of Bruegel paintings, and each chapter lists the percentage of that total he saw on that trip.
 
In the shortest chapters, Ferris visits a single museum to see only one painting, and whatever thoughts he shares sound trite. The longer chapters are better; my favorite was probably the chapter about his trip to America, where he talks about the risk of encountering bears while camping, getting angry at his brother while camping, a bear that appears in a Bruegel painting, a violent 'game' similar to bear-baiting that appears in a different painting, bears as a symbol of anger, and Bruegel's depiction of allegorical figures like the embodiment of anger. It's a chapter where Ferris's interlacing really works.

 

It wasn't particularly deliberate on my part, but I'm glad I read this in the winter, during my own Bruegel year.

Beautiful Useful Things

 
Beautiful Useful Things

What William Morris Made

by Beth Kephart

art by Melodie Stacey

Abrams

2022

 

 

Beautiful Useful Things is a children's picture book and a biography of the Victorian polymath William Morris, though it's very light on biographical detail.
 
Today, most people who recognize that name probably know Morris for his detailed patterns, which are still used on wallpapers and rugs. But Kephart focuses on Morris's love of nature and his work designing and handmaking a variety of goods, especially books. Rather than trying to reproduce Morris's dense patterns, Stacey uses similar natural motifs, but paints them big and loose, with a lot of negative space.
 
More than anything else, I think this book is trying to capture how Morris thought about things, and encourage young readers to adopt that mindset, at least for the length of the book. We learn about Morris's close observation of nature, and his desire to preserve artisan production in the face of industrialization. The cadence of Kephart's text, and the way the paragraphs are spread across the pages encourages slow reading.
 
The author's note mentions that Morris was an environmentalist and a founder of the Arts & Crafts movement in England, both of which show up clearly in this book. He was also a socialist, although I think you'd be hard pressed to guess that just from this book. The one-paragraph author's note also contains more historical detail about Morris than the entire rest of the book.
 
Stacey's watercolor art demonstrates the idea of reproducing natural images, and they're accentuated by images of knights and princesses, which reference the kinds of stories Kephart says Morris loved to read and to write himself. Fittingly, the font of this book is very pretty.
 
There is an irony, I suppose, to the way that Morris's drawings have become something else that's mass produced. His philosophy isn't dead, but it also isn't enacted nearly as much as he'd like, and his name is associated less with the content of his ideas than with the appearance of specific patterns. This book depicts Morris hand printing and sewing hardbacks of his own text - but is itself produced in the usual way. I wonder if any young readers will notice that disconnect?

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

 

 

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

by Philipp Deines

translated by Renata Stein and Ruth Bittorf

adapted from the biography by Julia Voss

David Zwirner Books

2022

 

 

I think it's fair to say that Hilma af Klint is having a moment. She was Swedish, a spiritualist, a painter, and possibly a lesbian, whose life and work spanned the late 1800s and early 1900s. She was one of the first abstract painters, predating several much better known names, and she was arguably underappreciated by other artists during her life.
 
af Klint was featured in a few European galleries in the 2010s, notably the 2013 Venice Biennale, and then she was given a solo exhibition in the Guggenheim in 2019, which had record-setting attendance. In addition to an exhibit book Paintings for the Future, there's also a recent biography by Julia Voss, a biopic called Hilma, and a novel, Sofia Lundberg's Friday Night Club.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, which is what I just read, is a graphic nonfiction biography of af Klint by Philipp Deines, who is Julia Voss's husband. If I understand correctly, this is a kind of simplified companion to or adaptation of his wife's book.
 

Deines tells af Klint's life story in five chapters, hence the title, and definitely hits all the high points. Hilma af Klint lost a beloved younger sister just as she herself was becoming an adult, and felt haunted by her sister's ghostly presence for the rest of her life. She was in a spiritualist club that did seances and  automatic writing and drawing, which might be where she first developed certain abstract symbols and motifs. She studied painting and initially produced portraits and landscapes in a more-or-less traditional style. She was the very close friend, and maybe lover, of another woman artist. She got work as a medical illustrator for a veterinary college.
 
Guided by her spiritualist beliefs and visions, af Klint developed an abstract style, trying to depict spiritual concepts in like, instructional diagrams. She exhibited more often to other spiritualists than to other artists, but felt unappreciated by both. A significant portion of her works were never shown during her life, and she included a stipulation in her will that they not be shown for at least 20 years after her death.
 
Deines's art style is kind of cartoony, but I appreciate that his goal seems to have been to show as many of af Klint's potential influences as he could. We see what the af Klint family estate looked like, we see Stockholm, we see af Klint's early realist art and the paintings of her contemporaries, and of course, we see examples of her groundbreaking abstract works. Taken together, all this gives you something valuable that text alone wouldn't be able to.
 
My one complaint about this book is that all the text is typed instead of being hand-lettered. And the font is like, Calibri, and it usually seems too small for the word bubbles its filling. The mechanical and low-effort look of the text was a jarring contrast with Deines's fluid and very human linework.

Love in the Library

 
Love in the Library
by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

art by Yas Imamura
Candlewick Press

2022

 

 

One of my coworkers is often on the lookout for new children's books and, like a lot of us, keeps an eye out for books that have been banned or challenged in some way. So it was through her that I got my hands on a copy of Love in the Library to read.

 
Love in the Library made the news not because it was banned by politicians or challenged by activists, but because the publisher tried to convince the author to change the book's content. Maggie Tokuda-Hall refused, Scholastic relented, and the book was published as she originally intended it.

 
I'm not excusing Scholastic's actions, but this is a prime example of the chilling effect that rightwing politicians and activists are hoping to cultivate. They want publishers scared to print, libraries scared to shelve, and teachers afraid to assign books that depict America's history of racism (among other topics.) What this incident shows me is that the book bans are working, they're having their intended effect, not just on the availability of these books after they're published, but on their ability to make it into print at all.
 

Love in the Library is a lightly fictionalized account of how Tokuda-Hall's grandparents met, fell in love, got married, and had their first child while they were both imprisoned in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII.

 
Tama works in the camp library, and the book is centered on her experiences. We see how she was plucked away from her old life, how harsh and degrading the conditions in the camp are, how difficult it is for Tama to retain any hope for the future. George comes to the library every day - ostensibly to return his books and check out new ones - although Tama finally realizes he can't read that fast, and that he's been coming every day to see her.

 
So the book itself functions to tell a bit of family history, and to introduce children to a shameful episode from American's relatively recent past. After the story is an author's note where Tokuda-Hall explains why she wrote the book, and where she calls out some of the more egregious examples of state-sponsored racism happening in America today, mostly to do with immigration policy. 

 
This note is clearly aimed at adults, and provides context for understanding how the book might fit in to discussions of contemporary events. It was this afterward, rather than any of the main text, that Scholastic asked Tokuda-Hall to change.

Flung Out of Space

 
Flung Out of Space
Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith
by Grace Ellis
art by Hannah Templer
Abrams Books

2022

 

 

Flung Out of Space is the graphic novel equivalent of a biopic - a lightly fictionalized account of its subject's life that attempts to faithfully portray real events in a comprehensible narrative. 

 
The book covers the period in Patricia Highsmith's life when she first became famous. In the beginning, she's working as an anonymous comic book author who's writing Strangers on a Train at home at night. She's also picking up women at a nearby bar.

 
Highsmith's public persona is smart, self-confident, and disdainful of anyone she considers her inferior (which extends to antisemitism and misogyny.) Privately, she's conflicted about her lesbianism. She likes flirting, likes sex, and is charismatic enough to make it look easy - but she feels guilty, considers herself mentally ill, and fears the social price she'd pay if she were found out.

 
Highsmith gets set up on a date with Stan Lee, and parlays the encounter into a second job writing for his comics company too. She uses the money to pay for a therapist, and later takes a seasonal job as a salesgirl at a department store to help afford it. She seems to fall in love with a woman she meets in group therapy, and also gets engaged to a man for the sake of respectability.

 
She finishes Strangers and her agent sells it to a publisher. It's a hit, and Hitchcock makes a movie of it. She gets her heart broken by her girlfriend, turns that into inspiration to write Carol. She meets with publishers to try to sell Carol, gets rejected over and over, until she finds someone willing to publish it under the guise of a pulp thriller. She breaks up with her boyfriend, quits therapy, quits comics, and finally goes to a lesbian bar instead of just her local. 

 
Templer's art is black, white, and grey, with shades of orange that seem to express the emotional intensity of the scene. We see visual representations of the thoughts that fill her head as she writes. The faces are expressive, perhaps especially when women are flirting.

 
It's funny to think of Patricia Highsmith as being part of the history of comics. I sort of doubt Stan Lee's biography would mention his one date with her as a significant turning point. She insisted on writing anonymously, so unless the companies she worked for kept impeccable records, we might never know exactly what she wrote. Templer uses the public domain hero The Black Terror to depict Highsmith's thoughts about superheroes. He is one of the characters Highsmith sometimes wrote for, and the skull logo on his costume fits well visually with her other violent thoughts.

 
Highsmith comes across as charismatic and compelling, but also so incredibly insecure and obsessed with status that it seems sad. She didn't want to be associated with comics or pulps, even publishing Carol under a pseudonym. Her internalized homophobia made her miserable, and she was contemptuous of other women and anyone who wasn't a WASP. 

 
I felt invested in what would happen to her though, and I really liked the art. Queer women, fans of Highsmith's writing, and maybe people interested in comic book history would probably all enjoy this one.

Putin's Russia

 
 
Putin's Russia
The Rise of a Dictator
by Darryl Cunningham

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

Putin's Russia is a work of graphic nonfiction, maybe graphic journalism. 

 
It's also a book overtaken by events, since it was published in February 2022, but completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fairness to Cunningham, something similar could happen to anyone who writes about still-living world leaders, and he does conclude with a warning about Putin's continuing threat to global democracy.

 
Cunningham's art uses thick lines and only a little solid color. His images accompany the text much like the visuals in an episode of Frontline, or the like.

 
The book briefly covers Putin's childhood and his work as a KGB officer in East Germany. The important part of the story probably picks up with Gorbachev's dismantling of the Soviet empire, when Putin starts as a corrupt municipal bureaucrat in 90s St Petersburg and quickly rises in the government, probably aided by his connection to the KGB, until he is Yeltsin's chosen successor, and the second president of 'democratic' Russia.

 
In a typical early incident, a non-corrupt city official realizes that Putin has been authorized to sell state assets to buy food, but instead he'd just been keeping the money. Ordinary people went hungry, Putin got rich with stolen money, the city councilors who voted to punish him were all dismissed by the mayor, and the official who reported him was intimidated into going into exile. The most unusual thing about this case, compared to Putin's future pattern of conduct, is that the official who challenged his theft was not murdered by hired thugs.

 
A lot of the rest is probably well-known by now, although I appreciated Cunningham showing how badly the post-Soviet rebuilding of Russia went wrong, and how likely it was that some oligarch or other would consolidate power over the others by using assassinations and selective prosecution (for the same corruption all of them engage in.) 

 
If Putin is distinguished from the crowd of kleptocrats, it is perhaps by his unusual brutality, such as when he arranged for the KGB's successor agency to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow in order to blame the crime on Chechan separatists and use that to justify an invasion and carpet bombing.

 
Cunningham's focus widens and his narrative becomes more diffuse as we reach the present day, and it becomes harder to decide which incidents are most important. The book ends with a call to action for the US and UK governments to crack down of money laundering and stop treating Putin like a normal world leader, rather than a mobster with a country.

Radioactive

 
Radioactive
Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
by Lauren Redniss
Dey Street Books

2010, reprinted 2015

 

 

Before reading Radioactive, I would have confidently called it a graphic novel.

 
But for one thing, it's not a novel, it's non fiction. Redniss tells the biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie leading up to their marriage, tells of their work together and marriage, and continues telling Marie's story after Pierre dies. She also tells a lot about radium and polonium, and interlaces the biography with vignettes of information about different "events" in the history of radioactivity, from the Radium Girls to Hiroshima to Chernobyl, at least a dozen in all. Redniss uses a lot of direct quotes, which makes her writing style feel journalistic.

 
Radioactive is illustrated, but it's also not a comic. There are no panels, and the art isn't sequential. Each page is a full-page illustration with text, like an artist's book. Redniss drew each page by hand, then photocopied it onto a transparency, then used that to develop a cyanotype - a kind of photograph where areas exposed to light turn blue, and the covered parts remain white. Some pages are orange, presumably from using a computer to invert the color, and others employ photographs in collage. Redniss also designed her own font and arranged the text on each page.

 
Marie Curie worked hard and made incredible discoveries about radioactivity, a term she coined. She won two Nobel prizes, one with Pierre in physics, and one alone in chemistry. After Pierre died, she had a love affair with a married scientist. Her children carried on her work, and as adults, her lover's son with his wife ended up marrying Marie and Pierre's daughter, and they also won a joint Nobel. Marie Curie's story is interesting in its own right, and Redniss's book is accessible and visually fascinating.