Safina lets his journalistic guard down and his opinions, speculations, and grinds personal axes and he loses me. There are one too many asides such as, "Really? Is that all you've got? Sorry; I have a lot of respect for professors, but I don't believe her," he writes in reaction to a professor who was demonstrating how to sniff food for traces of oil.
Also annoying is Safina's juvenile and relentless butchering of names (Admiral Thad Allen, of the Coast Guard, becomes the "Thadmiral"). Safina loses control of his story — a story, well-told as certain passages are in this book, about which we should be left to make our own judgments.
And then, as almost an afterthought, Safina has a change of heart about the government's handling of the disaster, after sitting down with Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, and now-retired Admiral Allen, to hear their side of the story. A better approach, in my view, would to have been to write the book with that perspective and knowledge, simply letting the story stand on its own.
I don't blame Safina for this; I blame his editors at Crown, who clearly didn't do their jobs in the rush to get this book out before most Americans thought the "Deepwater Horizon" was a new water ride at Six Flags rather than the disaster that captivated us for most of the summer of 2010.
Read the complete story from The Energy Collective.