DIVING WITH GIANTS - WHAT A SEDUCTIVE TITLE! There is no substitute for swimming alongside an animal that's bigger than you are.
New Holland has published a huge raft of dive books. It has contacts with many photographers with literally millions of photographs in their files. And it must have been easy to identify 10 possible authors from its stable of guidebook writers.
The Caribbean and Atlantic, Red Sea and Indian Ocean, the Indo-Pacific and the rest of the Pacific - editor Jack Jackson has left no part of the tropical and sub-tropical undersea world untouched. Most of the pictures are spectacular, dynamic and must represent memorable moments in the photographers' lives. This big coffee-table book is beautifully reproduced, too. So why doesn't it do it for me?
The design of a publication can make or break its content. I feel that New Holland has allowed its designers to shovel in the pictures such that almost every one is a wasted opportunity to draw us in and make us wonder. One works against the next. The pictures are diminished in the way they are displayed.
The designers obviously didn't realise what good material they had - they just cracked out another book. It's a formula production.
We are encouraged to flip through these rich pages and skip past images any photographer would die for. The individual contributions are much better than the sum of the parts.
I'm sorry, New Holland, if I damn your product in this way, but I'm a lot sorrier for the underwater photographers involved, who must be vastly disappointed. I hope they were well paid!
John Bantin

(NH, ISBN 1845371801). Hardback, 160pp, £29.99