Books live: National Geographic's Ocean Atlas

William J. Broad's Times piece on the new National Geographic "Ocean - An Illustrated Atlas gives a nice look at both the book -- and gives long-overdue and well-deserved attention to oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who co-authored the Atlas.

. Earle's passion extends to the far horizon. In the atlas, she reports that some 90 percent of deep-sea creatures use bioluminescence in their life strategies and that the eerie glows may turn out to constitute the planet's most common form of communication.