What exactly do we lose if we jeopardize the deepest stretches of the ocean?

Helen Scales will be here to talk about her new book, The Brilliant Abyss.

Had it an American woman in Germany stand up to Hitler and the Nazi Party?

Rebecca Donner will be here to talk about all the frequent troubles of our days.

The true story of the American woman at the heart of the German resistance to Hitler.

Liz Harris will be here with the latest in publishing news.

Plus, my colleagues and I will talk about what we're reading.

This is the Booker View Podcast for the New York Times. It's August 20th.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Helen Scales joins us now from rural Brittany in France.

Her new book is called The Brilliant Abyss,

Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat that

Impairls it. Helen, thanks for being here.

Pamela, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

So you've written a number of books about the ocean and the creatures that live within it,

including octopuses, eye of the soul, the great barrier reef, spirals in time,

and several others. How do you find your subjects each time?

I always find myself diving back into the ocean and into a topic that always, at the time, suddenly feels enormous and big and uncontrollable.

And I wonder how I got there.

But I guess I just, I follow either collections of stories that have come my way.

So the shelf book I wrote was the sort of realization that I had all these different stories about

human connections to seashells I wanted to tell.

...