Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau (review)

The famed marine naturalist gets the picture-book biography treatment here, starting with his youthful fascination with the water and with invention. The book then describes his travels with the French Navy and his invention of the aqualung, which finally permitted him to make the undersea explorations of which he'd always dreamed; those explorations eventually opened his eyes to the toll human carelessness was taking on the oceans and made him a leading advocate for the environment. This is really a thematic evocation rather than a biography, since it's more about Cousteau's thoughts and evolving philosophy than his life details (there's not a single date in the book proper, for instance, and only a peripheral one in the notes), and the writing is at times mannered in its tendency to make a stylistic trope out of repeated sentence fragments ("Films that played in movie theaters. Films that played on TV"). It's therefore somewhat slight as a chronicle, but it offers a colorful and evocative picture of one man's long love affair with the world below the waves. Acrylic illustrations make much use of smoky turquoise and jade green, even in the skies, suggesting the dominant shades of Cousteau's water-focused existence, and one foldout vertical spread dramatizes the depths to which he would literally sink. smoothly modeled figures of human (Cousteau is often distinguishable by his famous hawk's nose) and marine critters populate the spreads, making the underwater world into a lively multispecies crossroads. This might serve as useful background information for a showing of Cousteau's compelling videos, and it would pique the interest of young ocean enthusiasts. There's an appended author's note with a few details about Cousteau's life and some vague encouragement toward environmentalism; no source notes are included.