They are finally going to release an English version of "My Father, the Captain: My Life With Jacques Cousteau written by Jean-Michel Cousteau. It will be released on Amazon.com on May 18, 2010. They are currently taking pre-orders for the hard cover ($17.16). Amazon France lists the French language book of the same name at 350 pages (Mon père, le commandant, written by Jean-Michel Cousteau and first released in 2004). The new English language version is 272 pages. Not clear if the two books are identical or just in the sizes of the pages. If anyone knows more I would love to hear back.
I want to consider Cousteau the great man I remember from my youth but IMHO his life story remains severely tainted by all the fiction, much of it spread by him. The Cousteau biography I am most interested ("Cousteau, une biographie", Bernard Violet) is still only available in French. It contains some of the less popular topics. He is known to have performed a single mission for the resistance in January 1941. However, although he was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1946 the mission was carried out at the request of the Vichy government (Darlan) and not for the Free French movement. His actions on the mission are challenged by teammates. The resistance fighter Weliachew Dimitri was working with Cousteau at the time and he criticizes Cousteau of deliberately fleeing without caring the least about the fate of the rest of the team. Dimitri was imprisoned and tortured. Cousteau’s first free diving film, Eighteen Metres Deep, was screened on April 10 1943 to the collaborationist French education minister, the cultural cinema director of the Third Reich, and several hundred German army officers. Also in 1943 he develops a regulator and speaks of secret dives. However, within a short time that same year he is using it to dive under orders from the Italians and Germans. Cousteau writes his biggest competitor in SCUBA design (Commeinhes) died while diving his equipment instead of being the truth, that he was a victim of a German sniper while member of a French tank crew. Cousteau never mentions Commeinhes patent was awarded 3 years before Cousteau’s even though it is known through Taillez that the GERS tested Commeinhes unit. The Commeinhes unit ended up with less than a full sentence in the GERS produced 1949 diving book Plongee en Scaphandre.
I found the following articles of interest:
"20,000 lies under the sea The fishy world of Jacques Cousteau".
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 02346.html
"Cousteau was anti-Semitic and a liar" (Jon Henley, The Guardian, UK, Friday 18 June 1999)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/jun/18/jonhenley1