Ocean: Earth's Last Wilderness, by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield

This was a bigger hit with my teenage son than Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, which I think he found a bit too abstract too often. But I found bits of this harder to grapple with because so much of it is about wondrous things we cannot see - a series of visually arresting examples to explain the state of the ocean and what we're doing it, good and bad. We've not yet watched the accompanying film and I suspect, as with other books-of-TV-shows, that this one works best as an aide-memoire to what the reader has already seen.

It's largely directed at the huge harm done by industrialised fishing, especially bottom trawling, which is so destructive and wasteful - the damage visible from space. I suspect some of the visuals will be harrowing.

Attenborough makes good use of his years of experience, stepping forward as a witness of human-inflicted harm to the planet: he has seen the changes and effects he describes, and can compare the images he captured decades ago so shed light on where things are now. That then continues in the case studies, talking to people with long experience of particular places, who can tell us what it was like to scuba dive there or what local industry used to be like. That's important; at one point the book talks about the problem of people accepting the state of things now as normal rather than wrong.

What really sticks in my head is the evidence, from several different cases around the world, that the ocean can recover - at some speed - if given the chance. There are some extraordinary examples recounted. I was especially wowed by the success of the Sussex Kelp Recovery Project, off the coast of Selsey and Shoreham where I spent holidays in my childhood. It's so vividly described, I could see myself barefoot on those beaches littered with kelp from a storm, and then diving in the depths to see the replenished riches of the underwater world.

Whereas Earthrise was pessimistic, this compelling story is full of hope.