Recommendations from our site
“This is a wonderful book. It is about the whale, and everything about the whale – its history, its myth and its science. Whales are huge and compelling, and Philip Hoare’s excitement about them comes through. It is also a very handsome book and very nicely illustrated. We learn a lot about their lives but we also learn about the lore of whales – why they have always been important to us, and what throughout history has been thought about them. The crowning example is Moby Dick, which inspired Hoare to write his book. Moby Dick was in many ways about a mythological version of whales. As Melville intended, it tells us more about us than it does about the whale. It’s about hysteria really – concepts of evil and our hysterical reactions to them.” Read more...
Mark Kurlansky, Science Writer
