Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Steve Mentz's Ocean shows us that retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view disorients familiar stories and creates a new sense of our relationship with nature. Unlike conventional stories that describe civilizations made through agricultural settlement or violent conquest, in the ocean humans labor more vulnerably as either sailors or swimmers. Our engagement with the planet's waters can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the discrepancy between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty of human experience.
Embracing the omnipresence of salt water in human history, Ocean combines history, myth, poetry, and narrative in order to revise the human story on a nonhuman scale.
From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into an unfamiliar context.