To the relief of at least one oceanographer at the time, Jacques (maybe) saw a flatfish through his porthole.ДЄre there doubters? Of course. In one of the more depressing twists of modern exploration, governments want Piccard to determine if there is sea life in the trench if not, they would see it as a suitable location to dispose of nuclear waste (!). Three decades after his father rose into the sky and became the first human to see the curvature of the earth, Jacques (not to be confused with Jacques Cousteau, who makes an apposite appearance) wants to breach a part of the earth so remote, so deep and so foreign that no one is sure whether the water has enough oxygen to support life. And itвЂ™s an undertaking so heady it requires a new generation of Piccard to carry the torch. At more than 35,000 feet down, itвЂ™s deeper than Mt. With two-mile plunges in the Mediterranean under his belt, Auguste sets his sights on the deepest known point on Earth - a depression in the Mariana Trench known, appropriately, as the Challenger Deep. Moving from balloons to deep-water diving bathyscaphes, Auguste wants to open вЂњthe doors of the abyss to man.вЂќ And pretty soon, in a submarine vessel modeled after his stratospheric balloon, heвЂ™s completing record deep dives (staying ahead of the sneaky French navy, which is never far behind). ItвЂ™s not long before he pines to go down. First, in the early 1930s, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard does what no man had done before when he builds a hot-air balloon and ascends 10 miles into the atmosphere.ДЄuguste, who is soon dubbed вЂњthe Columbus of space,вЂќ (although, unlike Columbus, presumably there was no one there waiting when he got to his destination) doesnвЂ™t stop with reaching for the heavens. The Explorer Gene begins with the first of three generations of a family whose DNA compels them to push the limits of humansвЂ™ earthly limitations. вЂњWe donвЂ™t have to go the highest, the deepest, or the furthest, to make use of them.вЂќ вЂњWe all have explorer genes,вЂќ writes author Tom Cheshire in his debut book, which spans family, adventure and conquest.

Gene book review