Apr 9, 1115am ~~ Review asap.

Apr 10, 5pm ~~ I have read many of Steinbeck's fiction titles in the past, but I had never heard of this book until I stumbled across it while browsing my favorite online used bookseller. When I began to read, I became a little confused about timelines: when exactly the trip took place and what
was the actual publication date did not seem too clear to me.

But I did not research those questions until just now, when I found this at Wiki:
In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their coauthored book, Sea of Cortez (December 1941), about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.

That certainly settled my timeline questions. And helped explain why there was a long essay about Ricketts at the beginning of this book. Steinbeck was thorough in introducing the reader to his friend, and it became clear before I ever got to the 'log' that here was a friendship like very few of us are allowed to find in this world. There is nothing quite so wonderful as having someone to talk with who will understand us, stretch our horizons, make us think, and yet at the same time always accept us for who and how we are. This seemed to be the type of friendship these two men had. One of Ricketts' biographers even said that Steinbeck's writing suffered after Ricketts died in 1948. I don't know about that, but I can imagine the emptiness left after losing such a friend.

When it comes to the actual log, I was both surprised at it and annoyed by much of it. The purpose of the trip was to collect specimens of sea life from various tidal pools in the Sea Of Cortez, in between Baja California and mainland Mexico. Naturally this collecting meant forcing the sea creatures out of their homes and putting them through the process of pickling in formaldehyde. The amount of scooping up and killing they did was astounding and depressing, and I eventually began to skip the lists of which creatures they found where. I also could not understand how Steinbeck could not see the similarities between what he and his crew were doing on their little boat and what the Japanese crew of an ocean trawler were doing. He condemned their actions, and yet he disrupted the ecosystems of dozens of tidal pools and would not see that his own actions were nearly as destructive.

What surprised me were the many riffs into philosophy, where Steinbeck talked about his ideas about society, government, mankind, and many other topics. Probably, judging by that earlier essay, these were topics that were discussed many times between the two friends and most certainly on this boat trip, but the first few times they showed up they caught me off guard. What also caught me off guard was how often I agreed with Steinbeck's opinions. And how very little the world has changed since his time.

Remember that this edition was published in 1951. Towards the end of the book he says:
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.

I will be reading more Steinbeck over the next three months. I had planned to re-read Cannery Row right after finishing this book, but I got distracted by another title in my Next pile. And then I got distracted again by a biography of Steinbeck that arrived the other day. So when I finish my current trip through Mexico City with Homero Aridjis, I will read the Steinbeck bio and then Cannery Row (Ed Ricketts was 'Doc' in that book) and go from there. I am curious to see how my older grumpier self reacts to the books I was so impressed with in my younger years. I also now have a few titles that I have never read, and I am very much looking forward to those as well.

It is, at face value, a report covering a scientific expedition. But it is also philosophical, ironic, teeming with dry wit and humorous anecdotes, and it covers humanity as much as it does marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.
It paints a picture of who Steinbeck is as a person, of his views and beliefs, all in his own straightforward manner of writing. Well worth the read, even, or maybe especially, if you're not interested in marine biology.

Anyone with even a minor interest in marine biology, or the more likely interest in Ed Ricketts (see "Cannery Row" and "Sweet Thursday"),or a personal weakness for tooling around in boats with friends (see "The Wind In the Willows" Kenneth Grahame - Ratty to Mole: "Believe me, my friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.")will like this book. It's not "Grapes of Wrath" mind you, it's soaking wet and as different as you can get. It's more like "The Kon-Tiki Expedition" by Thor Heyerdahl, in fact, I recommend that book to anyone who likes this one.

John Steinbeck was a fascinating man, not just an amazing writer. He was interested in the world around him, and he knew how to translate that world into words. One passage, I wish I could find it, tells how there are some flatworms that are so delicate that they can't be removed from the sand without destroying them and if you want to collect one, you have to put your bucket next to it and hope it crawls in - and he directly relates this to how delicate the truth can be, that sometimes it is so subtle that it can't be told without destroying it. Steinbeck the writer and Steinbeck the marine biologist are one and the same - and this is one of his best books.

This book delights on so many levels: travelogue, historical snapshot from the eve of WWII, biology and ecology lesson, musings on philosophy and sociology, and fun adventure tale, suffused throughout with Steinbeck's pleasant wit and insight. How this book has remained so unknown and relatively unread boggles the mind. Certainly there are parts that would appeal more to students of biology - those that can tell a gastropod from an echinoderm. The addendum is a biography/extended eulogy for his co-author, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, the model for the fictional Doc of Cannery Row/Sweet Thursday. Best read after those two novels, or perhaps before going back and re-reading them, as is my plan. The audiobook edition is narrated very nicely by Joe Barrett.