I've spent the last hour and a half speed-reading this book to its end. I'm unable to say much good about this book. Outside of a few insightful moments and the creative parallels between nature and man, which Steinbeck draws in each of his books, the book was to me average. Further, it demands extensive knowledge of marine biology that I, and anyone who isn't fervently interested in the topic, lack.

Because I lacked this knowledge I will not give this book a review in stars. In the same way that an extensive study of quantum mechanics belongs in the hands of a scientist, this, to a less degree, belongs in the hands of a marine biologist.

3 1/2 stars. Really enjoyed all the nature talk. Lost some respect for his colleague when he talked about him at the end.

Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts plus company went on an expedition in 1940 to find small sea animals in the Gulf of California. This book is Steinbeck’s reworking of Ricketts’ logs plus an In Memoriam from Steinbeck after Ricketts died.
It is a mixture of male adventure (giving me more than once associations of Hemingway), ecology (even though all the repetitive descriptions of yet another sea urchin or snail got tedious after a while), amateur philosophy (teleology vs. non-teleology) and culture (tiny coastal villages in Mexico inhabited by curious people).
It is interesting enough to keep reading, yet lacks strong purpose and repeats itself frequently. A Steinbeck is a Steinbeck, though.

I loved this book and there isn't any review that I could write that could do it justice. I enjoyed getting to know John Steinbeck and his friends. I enjoyed his philosophical dissertations about life. (Although, I will admit, there was one chapter that I did doze through.) Yes, it is interesting that we spend so much money on health care and so much money on war to kill us. Yes, I agree we spend so much on STUFF so that one neurotic generation raises another neurotic generation. It is also interesting that he wrote down these ideas around 1940 and so much of them seemed written in the present time.

I know very little about marine biology so pictures of these sea creatures they collected would really have helped. I love Steinbeck's straight-laced sense of humor that just permeates this book. I also am curious as to what the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) looks like nowadays. It seemed beautiful in this book.

I appreciate the afterword about Ed Ricketts, his marine biologist friend. After reading Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, you gotta love Ed (Doc). That was a good ending to this book.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez is ...an offbeat book. In 1941, John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts chartered the Western Flyer, a 76 foot fishing boat for a month long voyage to the Gulf of California, otherwise known as the Sea of Cortez. The purpose of the voyage was to collect aquatic animals from the Gulf.
It's been years since I read one of Steinbeck's books, but I never had him pegged as an expert on aquatic creatures. But he must have known quite a bit, since he wrote this book. A clever reader would read the book with their computer open beside them, googling the animals Steinbeck and Ricketts found, so they would have some idea of what the book is talking about. I didn't do that, but Steinbeck's lovely prose gives a good idea of some of the creatures, and I had heard of others, such as anemones, clams of varying types, snails, ditto, and sponges. The book does have a glossary, which I suggest you use if you want to read the book.
I found The Log... slow going, but worthwhile. Even though I had almost no idea what 75 percent of the creatures they were collecting were, the descriptions of the scenery along the Gulf, the little towns they visited, accounts of interactions among Ricketts, Steinbeck and the crew and his philosophizing about creation, human happiness, the ruinous nature of capitalism, etc, make the book entirely worth it.

At some time in my life this would have been my favorite book. Marine invertebrates AND Steinbeck philosophizing? But these days all the philosophizing falls a little flat, it all feels like men patting themselves on the back for being so original while making all the same tired mistakes about indigenous people and women and human progress. Also maybe I've lost faith in the project of human discovery that fuels biology, so all these beautiful organisms die miserably in Steinbeck's collection and for what?

This is a shortened version of Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, presenting just the narrative parts of that book, leaving out the charts and data. SoC was a non-fiction field research report, covering an expedition to collect biological samples from the tidal littoral of the Gulf of California. Unfortunately for literary history, the book came out in late 1941, and the major reviews would appear in the Sunday newspapers of December 7. Scholars strongly suspect that the book would have been much better known, but for the timing of its appearance.

I'd heard of this book, but an undergraduate student (who was taking it in another class) brought it into my office to talk about, and that put it on my must-read list. It was my initial foray to the bookstore to buy this book which found me, instead, another of his non-fiction works: Once There Was a War. So, I read that one first, loved it, and that guaranteed I would get to this one sooner, rather than later.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, having read little about the Gulf of California, and almost nothing about its biology. There is now a "period piece" air to this book, as well, which was also a plus. I intended, however, to limit it to four stars in my rating because there are some interesting philosophical passages in here, but there are also some that get both vague and long-winded. At least some of that material is actually from Ed Ricketts, but since Steinbeck revised everything we have his name on it.

However, this Penguin Classics edition takes an introductory essay Steinbeck wrote after Ricketts's tragic death, and tacks it on as an appendix. It's that which got the fifth star out of me. Ricketts was an "interesting character" in life, and was fictionalized in Cannery Row, again in Sweet Thursday, and yet again in Burning Bright. He was also a big influence on Joseph Campbell, and the artist Henry Miller. And, in each case, vice versa.

Steinbeck's appreciation of his friend is a gem, and one of those attempts to explain to folks who didn't know him/her how an inspirational character affects people. (I remember all the folks who knew Socrates and tried to write down how that worked.) Ricketts was a very mixed individual, but Steinbeck is the kind of person who accepts the good with the problematical. I loved his phrase of someone having the weaknesses of their virtues.

Back to the main text. While most of this is simple travelogue, from folks who spent their time on unoccupied Mexican beaches picking up samples, Steinbeck can't write many plain pages. His observations are interesting, and he tells stories with a humorous note to them. I read several sly paragraphs to my wife, as I came across them. I particularly liked the two crew members who were such avid fishermen that they couldn't reliably steer the boat, because they'd keep leaving the wheel in order to bring in the catch. The boat had a tendency to get lost, every time they stood watch.

Ricketts and Steinbeck had an early interest in ecology, it came up in many of their discussions, and one of the things they came across was a flotilla of Japanese trawlers scraping the bottom for shrimp, and throwing away everything else the nets brought in. That occasioned a discussion of how this would clearly destroy the fishery if left unchecked, and this interesting opinion: "We in the United States have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our land, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity." He then goes on to say that the Japanese who are doing this are good people, but that what they are doing is, in fact, evil.

Absolutely loved this book. Half tide pool adventuring, half classic Steinbeck philosophical tangents. Also one of the funnier books I’ve read. Caught myself laughing out loud multiple times. If you love science or beer or sea cucumbers or teleological thinking give this book a go!

Do you ever catch yourself smiling like an idiot when you're reading something pleasurable? Well, my smile muscles hurt.

The log begins with an introduction Steinbeck wrote, "About Ed Ricketts," after his travel companion from the journey chronicled here died. It's gorgeous! What a fascinating man he was!! I had just read Cannery Row, and Ricketts inspired the character of Doc, so I was happy to learn about him, or at least what could be related to me in 50 pages or so. Steinbeck mentions that after his death, the people of Cannery Row tried to define him. Of those he heard, half-Christ and half-goat was the description that he liked best.

There really needs to be a movie about Steinbeck and Ricketts. Someone do that. It would be so lushly beautiful, whether they're communing over (many) beers in Doc's laboratory in Monterey, or sailing into shallow wade pools along the Gulf of Mexico or having one of their four-day long parties, where nobody went to bed except for "romantic purposes." I know that there is a movie version of Cannery Row, but it wouldn't have John Steinbeck in it. And it wouldn't have this trip in it! No, Steinbeck says in the introduction that Ricketts was his closest friend for eighteen years. I want to watch them being friends.

An essential scene would be when they were allowed onto a large commercial Japanese shrimping dredge in Mexico that, to Steinbeck and Ricketts' horror, simply scraped the ocean floor of absolutely every speck of life, then dumped everything that wasn't shrimp, now lifeless, back into the bay. Ricketts and Steinbeck stared at vast collection of fish, sharks, anemones, rays, corals and seahorses being tossed back into the sea for the gulls. All that knowledge, all that food, wasted! An entire ecosystem wiped out. And, in true form to the way Steinbeck honors even the most miserable lech in his fiction, he loved these men working on the Japanese shrimping dredge! Loved them! He said, "they were good men, but they were caught in a large, destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing." He promised to send them a fine volume of crustacean biology when he returned to Monterey.

The missing star is only absent because, after reading the introduction, I expected the same intimate, personal style to be woven into the log, throughout, and it wasn't really so. It was still a narrative, and many of their adventures and conversations and struggles were described, but just not in the same casual manner. I know this wasn't that sort of book, but god, it could have been! Okay, I already feel guilty being (just a titch) fussy about this, because what this book is is just great. I'll stop being a whiner. I just wanted more Doc. In the intro I learned that Ricketts had such an affection for marine worms that he called girls he liked (and there were many), "wormy" as a term of endearment. So you can see why I wanted more.

Now, you like Steinbeck, but are still unsure if you want to read this nonfiction account of tide pool specimen-gathering? Here is how you will know for sure that it is for you. Do you love lists of captivating and beautiful and sexy-as-hell, sciency words? Here is just one of the many lists describing some of their catches to help you decide:

"One huge, magnificent murex snail...so camouflaged with little plants, corallines, and other algae that it could not be told from the reef itself...rock oysters were there, and oysters; limpets and sponges; corals of two types; peanut worms; sea-cucumbers, and many crabs, particularly some disguised in dresses of growing algae...many worms, including our enemy Eurythoe, which stings so badly. The coral clusters were violently inhabited by snapping shrimps, red smooth crabs and little fuzzy black and white spider crabs."

And don't think that it's all lists and clinical talk! He had a way of finishing off each chapter with a lucid and dreamy bit of philosophy or reflection:

"This little trip of ours was becoming a thing and a dual thing, with collecting and eating and sleeping merging with the thinking-speculating activity. Quality of sunlight, blueness and smoothness of water, boat engines, and ourselves were all parts of a larger whole and we could begin to feel its nature but not its size."

Another chapter ends with his defense of drunkenness, another with a defense of laziness and another with a cry about the depletion of our natural resources and another with the beauty of scooping fish while you sail and dropping them directly into a pan of hot oil, eating hundred of the delicious and salty things with friends in the moonlight. This book is just so pretty. If you don't watch out, Steinbeck will make you love the world.

I picked this back up during the covid pandemic. Loved being immersed into ocean life and transported back in time. And also found the passages on how schools of fish survive to be timeless and apropos to the current moment.

John Steinbeck’s, The Log From the Sea of Cortez, is a must-have book for serious Baja aficionados. It is an account of the glory days of Baja California before “improvements” such as the Transpeninsular Highway, hotel resorts and tourism. John Steinbeck, in his best narrative style, gives us back Baja…the Baja many of us still remember. He poignantly describes the essence of this remote, capricious territory and the beaconing sea that washes it shores. Steinbeck’s acute observation attempts to make sense of the mystique of this place, a place which has drawn so many of us out of our civilized comforts and sent us chasing down dusty, desolate roads in search of her remote bays and islands.

The author takes us back to the Baja of the early forties, at the outbreak of WWII, when Gringos were still a novelty. We are caught up in an adventure of grand proportions where John Steinbeck along with his close friend, Ed Ricketts, circumnavigate the peninsula on the fishing trawler, The Western Flyer, collecting marine flora and fauna along the way. The reader is drawn into this journey of exploration, as Steinbeck and crew fall under the spell of the mystery and power of this wondrous place.

The starkness of the Baja landscape and the warm, life-sustaining azure waters of the Sea of Cortez are painted in sharp contrast. Steinbeck attempts to make sense of a land that has confounded most who have touched her shores. He celebrates Baja’s ability to re-invent herself…to reclaim herself, as she has resisted centuries of invasion by people who would change her into their own image.

The reader is brought closer to the life of this place as we are introduced to the wonders of the Sea of Cortez. This book shows us that Baja and her people have remained true to her essence. We are given hope that this enchanted land, which has served so many of us as a mistress of adventure, will not decline or fade.

Read and re-read this book if you love Baja as I do!

The Log itself could be dull at times with some lovely standout moments, but the Appendix 'About Ed Ricketts' was the highlight. 3.5