The Blue Planet

This was a very good book and it goes great with the Blue Planet video series. Ocean creatures are amazing. I bet you'll at least find at least one thing in this book you have never known before. If you love the ocean and want to know what's in it, this will be an excellent book to read.

A wonderful book with absolutely staggering photography throughout. You can snorkle and scuba-dive without even leaving your armchair. Just flicking through it when it first arrived I saw page after page of creatures I had never seen before. Packed with information, beautifully presented on good quality paper. What else can you expect from a product linked to the BBC, David Attenborough, and Discovery Channel. DK publishing excel again. The authors Andrew Byatt, Alastair Fothergill and Martha Holmes deserve a round of applause. This is a much valued addition to my collection of books.

After watching the 'Blue Planet' documentaries on TV I developed an interest about life under the sea. Some of the documentary footage was truly groundbreaking work in terms of capturing the animals on film and bringing it to our homes in such a unique way. The book, like the documentary is truly a great piece of work. It's well planned, presented and written. It covers all aspects of ocean life with out becoming to specific with regard to certain species. Some of the photographs throughout the book are truly wonderful; this book is a must for everyone, of all ages. It will satisfy any appetite for deep-sea discovery, shore life and marine biology.5 Stars, This book has everything you need and more, and the presentation is second to none.

This book is so well written, so cleanly designed and so perfectly illustrated that it is required reading to all nature lovers, particularly those interested in the strange, beautiful and other-wordly life of the deep sees. Brilliant and sure to appeal to ages ranging from 8 to 80 years old.

DK Publishers have put out some stunning volumes recently, but they have especially outdone themselves with two: "Animal" and "The Blue Planet". Lavishly illustrated and gloriously photographed, "The Blue Planet" is a fascinating exploration of the 70% of our world that we don't live in. As one of the authors states, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own oceans. "Blue Planet" tries to address the imbalance and, for the lay reader, succeeds admirably. The book is excellently organized and written in plain language comprehensible to almost any reader. It's divided into seven main parts: an overview of the ocean system, coastal shorelines, tropical seas, temperate seas, frozen seas, the open ocean, and the deep. Each part is divided into subsections with reference arrows to other relevant sections, making it easy to use for research. We learn a lot about the feeding, mating and survival patterns of the inhabitants of each layer of the ocean; most fascinating to this reviewer was the dazzling spectacle of the light shows caused by bioluminescence in fish that live so deep down that most of us will only see them on film. There's also a photograph of a dead giant squid, proving that archyteuthis is no figment of anyone's imagination; we wonder if anyone will ever glimpse a live one. The book is a companion volume to the excellent series on the Discovery Channel but it stands up very well on its own. It's a must-have for anyone interested in the infinite variety of life on this world.