Fifty Places to Dive Before You Die: Diving Experts Share the World's Greatest Destinations - Chris Santella

My first reaction on receiving this book in the post was surprise - I thought it would be much bigger than it is. The websites left me imagining a coffee-table book; it could be, but doesn't have the breadth of pictures that many do and is a lot smaller than most. What it does have is a lot of ideas, some more original than others.

The book is fairly square-shaped - basically the width is the same as an A4 book, it's just a lot shorter. ...
...are a number of decent pictures. Most of the individual reviews are 3-5 pages long, with one illustration - but some have none.

The format of this book is that it's 50 reviews of places by individual writers, rather than all written by the same author. It forms part of a series of "50 best", all edited by Chris Santella. As such, it has the potential to fall down due to a (?) non-diving editor, but the reviews are done by ... more

My first reaction on receiving this book in the post was surprise - I thought it would be much bigger than it is. The websites left me imagining a coffee-table book; it could be, but doesn't have the breadth of pictures that many do and is a lot smaller than most. What it does have is a lot of ideas, some more original than others.

The book is fairly square-shaped - basically the width is the same as an A4 book, it's just a lot shorter. It's not as lavishly illustrated as I'd hoped, but there are a number of decent pictures. Most of the individual reviews are 3-5 pages long, with one illustration - but some have none.

The format of this book is that it's 50 reviews of places by individual writers, rather than all written by the same author. It forms part of a series of "50 best", all edited by Chris Santella. As such, it has the potential to fall down due to a (?) non-diving editor, but the reviews are done by interview with individual divers, so that doesn't really happen. Apparently these are 50 experts from around the world - I have to say I haven't heard of most of them, but the ones I have are well-known in the diving industry (e.g. Mike Ball, who runs a liveaboard company on the Great Barrier Reef).

Many of the reviews concentrate either on a particular site, or a particular feature of the area, e.g. diving with hammerheads, or sunfish (also called mola mola). They're well-written, but with an average of around 3 pages there's not much space for going into detailed information, it's only really a taster. There's some excellent pictures, such as the whale shark in the Belize section, but some of the pictures are a little underwhelming - there's quite a few of shoaling fish.

At the end of each chapter there's a few lines on practicalities - getting there, best time to go and accommodation options; this is hardly comprehensive, but in the internet age is probably a useful start.

There's a rather American slant to the sites - two of the three UK entries are actually Caribbean islands, with only one actually near the UK mainland (Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands). It's also noticeable in that most chapters are indexed by country then site, whereas the US entries are by state then site. Having said that, there's only four US sites out of the 50, and these are quite broadly spread geographically (Florida, N Carolina, Washington and Hawaii).

The RRP is £14.99, slightly steep for a small book, but it's currently half that price on Amazon. As an aside, one reason this book may be less popular currently is that one of the UK dive magazines (Sport Diver) has recently published a guide to "100 dives to do before you die". This is in magazine format, but at £4.95 it's covers a wider range of sites. 50 dives is hardly comprehensive, and I'm sure many people will be able to think of omissions.However, the amount of info in this other guide iseven less per site, so the book actually offers about equal value, it just depends what you're looking for.

To be honest, even with just the 50 sites in the book I expect I'll struggle to do them all in my lifetime, but I'll give it a go! 

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