Thomas Farber – författare

Millions of people visit aquariums each year. These showplaces are invaluable educational tools and, more importantly, provide a window into a mysterious world that few of us will ever experience firsthand. But that world is increasingly threatened by human misuse - by pollution, over-fishing, global warming. Accompanying the waste and devastation is a global trend toward building bigger, more fantastic aquariums. Marvels of architecture and engineering, these artificial oceans seem to be our way of preserving the sea even as we destroy it. The black and white duotones presented in ""Other Oceans"" are the result of visits to 14 aquariums in the United States and Japan and diving trips off the coasts of California (including Santa Barbara Island), Hawai'i, and Midway Atoll. In this work, award-winning photographer Wayne Levin seeks to understand and depict not only our complex relationship with captive marine life, but our love affair with technology, our desire for contact with other species, our impulse to educate, our capacity to dominate. Together with text by Thomas Farber and essays by Bruce A. Carlson, director of the Waikiki Aquarium, and nature writer and poet Frank Stewart, the captivating images gathered here should forever change the way we view these ""other oceans.

Elegant, exuberant, and idiosyncratic, Acting My Age is a memoir and meditation by one of America’s most playful and inventive writers. In the words of Mary Mackey (The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams), "in Acting My Age, Thomas Farber gives us an unflinching, luminous, cleverly conceived meditation on his own mortality as well as on the extinction of the coral reefs, snow leopards, dolphins, and, ultimately the human species. Couching his observations in a series of short, interconnected, almost-epigrammatic essays that read like prose poems, Farber creates a narrative style reminiscent of Joyce and Melville: oceanic in depth and all-encompassing in range."Gerald Fleming (The Choreographer), calls Acting My Age "a praise song, an exultation in the beauties and brutalities of being human. Though Thomas Farber is wide-eyed at the miracle of our existence, his prose details both the collapse of species and ultimate trajectory of our aging bodies. This polymathic dive into a writer’s remaining time—into the life of the earth, the sea, and meaning itself—is no mere memoir, but an elegant, instructive page-after-page of language-love."Robert Roper (Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita), adds: "Tom Farber is always good company, and his ‘late writings’ are more and more indispensable, full of comfort for the perplexed, rich in learning, humorous, masculine and tender, evoking large sensations and vast views; a reader thinks of Montaigne, Whitman, and other of the great truth-tellers, modest of tone, intimate in approach, friends bringing deep gifts.