
It is as complex, multichambered and beautiful as its subject, and if Barnett can awaken our sense of wonder, then perhaps there is hope for jump-starting our collective sense of responsibility toward the oceans and one another." - Katherine Norbury - The Washington Post ""Seashells were money before coin, jewellery before gems, art before canvas," says science writer Cynthia Barnett in her arresting meditation on shells and ocean history. It stretches our capacity to absorb new knowledge. It is a history of fascination and of shame.

"The Sound of the Sea" is a glorious history of shells and of those who have loved shells. Cynthia Barnett presents us with a glittering Wunderkammer for our age, a staggeringly varied history - scientific, cultural, philosophical and economic - of one of the most beloved and enduring natural objects on Earth: the seashell.

Spiraling out from the great cities of shell that once rose in North America to the warming waters of the Maldives and the slave castles of. Barnett's account remarkably spirals out, appropriately, to become a much larger story about the sea, about global history and about environmental crises and preservation." - 24 Books to Read this Summer - The New York Times Book Review ". In The Sound of the Sea, acclaimed environmental author Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them.
