Ocean Country ─ One Woman's Voyage from Peril to Hope in Her Quest to Save the Seas

This gripping adventure story of one woman's odyssey from a near-drowning accident to a journey around the world to understand the threats to the vitality of our oceans vividly illustrates the crucial role that each of us has to play in one of the most urgent social movements in history. After almost dying in a kayaking accident in which she was paralyzed, Liz Cunningham begins an odyssey both to regain her health and to learn more about the beloved ocean that nearly killed her. She discovers a monumental crisis: the rapidly-degrading state of the seas threatens all life as we know it. Cunningham combines her perspective as a woman at the most vulnerable juncture of her life with skills honed during her career as a journalist to create an absorbing narrative that leads readers through unexpected encounters with conservationists, fishermen, sea nomads, and scientists in the Caribbean, California, West Papua, the Mediterranean, and beyond.Ocean Country charts the author's intimate, action-packed struggle to transform despair into strength and to discover what true hope is.

LIZ CUNNINGHAM is the author of Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age(Praeger), which features frank and probing oral-history interviews with top television journalists such as Tom Brokaw, Larry King, and Robin MacNeil. She has written forEarth Island Journal, East Bay Express, the Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The Outward Bound International Journal, Times of the Islands, and theSan Francisco Chronicle. She has collaborated with institutions such as the Academy for Educational Development, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. She also serves on the board of Outward Bound Peacebuilding and holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.