The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
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- ISBN13: 9780061976216
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
From his childhood fascination with the gigantic Natural History Museum model of a blue whale to his adult encounters with the living animals in the Atlantic Ocean, the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare has been obsessed with whales. Journeying through human and natural history, The Whale is the result of his voyage of discovery into the heart of this obsession and the book that inspired it: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Taking us deep into their domain, Hoare shows us these mysterious creatures as they have never been seen before. Following in Ishmael’s footsteps, he explores the troubled history of man and whale; visits the historic whaling locales of New Bedford, Nantucket, and the Azores; and traces the whale’s cultural history from Jonah to Free Willy. Winner of the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, The Whale is an unforgettable and regularly moving attempt to clarify why these weird and gorgeous animals still wield such a powerful hold on our imagination.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: After reading Moby Dick, leader Philip Hoare was so captivated by the theme that he spent years trying to fathom the planet’s most enormous and enigmatic of creatures. Hoare’s admitted mania for whales led him to write Leviathan, or the Whale—which was awarded the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for nonfiction. The book has finally migrated to this side of the Atlantic under a new title, The Whale. Hoare is not a scientist, but rather a biographer whose subjects have tended toward highbrow facts like Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde. In approaching cetaceans, the leader’s non-scientific background works to fantastic advantage. Similar to Melville, Hoare has captured a wide range of past and scientific facts about whales, but has chosen to present them through an extremely powerful instrument–the literary imagination. The result is a deeply moving and thought-provoking biography of the planet’s toughest, yet most vulnerable of prehistoric survivors. The Whale takes us well beyond the limits of what we can see, hear or otherwise objectively “know” about whales, and offers a much more plain sense of their right magnitude. –Lauren Nemroff
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I expected a book on whales–different types, habits, culture, etc. This is more a book on the history of whaling, using Melville’s Moby Dick as a template. I really didn’t care for it, and stopped reading before I was middle through. I establish the descriptions of whaling practices disturbing. Perhaps that was what the leader proposed, but I didn’t like it. It’s a well written and well structured book, but not pleasant and not frankly particularly appealing to me.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I loved this book.
fantastic tale of Man, Whales, and their subsequent crash in one man, Philip Hoare.
a MUST read for anyone who’s ever had any interest in whales or Moby Dick.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is a masterful tale of the majesty of whales, and the history of whaling that, in retrospect, now seems cruel but at the time was not deemed to be so. Like Mr. Hoare, for me “Whales exist beyond the normal…”. But, in my book, ‘The Tempest’s Roar’, I sprinted across the line of anthropomorphism where he, perhaps wisely, chose not to tread. Nevertheless, this book adds a very much powerful piece to the body of knowledge about these magnificent beings, as well as the tragedy that humans once inflicted upon them. R.A.R. Clouston
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Philip Hoare became fascinated by whales as a child, and that interest deepened with his fantastic appreciation of Herman-Melville’s “Moby-Dick”. His lifelong obsession — that is not too strong a word — with whales has led him to write “The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea”, a book about what we know about whales (and what we do not know), about whale-hunting (sorry to say, the dominant traditional mode of interaction between humans and whales), and about his own personal journey to learn and know.
“The Whale” is a volume full of both wonders (the magnificent whales themselves) and woes (primarily the dismal history of hunting whales), the whole illuminated by Hoare’s musings about his own experiences and quest to better know whales. The book is not a dry compendium of biological details, although certainly there are copious and fascinating tidbits of information, such as that a recent study has shown that Arctic bowhead whales can live for more than two hundred years. Rather, it is an intensely personal interest into all things whale, carried out with powerful and elegant writing.
My personal mental imagery of whaling is firmly tied to the nineteenth century, courtesy of childhood visits to Mystic Seaport and the New Bedford Whaling Museum and much influenced by Melville’s “Moby-Dick”. Regardless of whether the men setting into the world in their wooden vessels to hunt whale should be viewed as having something of the “heroic” about them, at least — as Hoare puts it — the whales had a chance to fight back. Twentieth century whaling, mechanized and mechanical — as depicted in gory detail by the leader was as a replacement for a horror appropriate for an industrialized Dante’s “Inferno”.
To balance the melancholy tale of whale hunting, but, the leader also includes his personal joyful experiences of whale watching and, in a wonderful concluding chapter, of swimming with whales off the Azores.
Although “The Whale” in part makes for grim reading, in the end the volume is an entrancing portrait of wondrous creatures and of hope for our future relations with them.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book because it covered the whaling industry from a broad perspective. Some reviewers have complained that it is not a biology textbook about whales. This is right. What it is a very literary, simple to read, yet fact filled musing about the whole theme of whales and whaling. There is not any overly emotional, hand wringing or politicization of the theme, yet the leader does not shrink from problematic areas such as the of using intelligent living beings as a source of renewable energy, margarine or lipstick and corsets. Yet humans can find excellent use for any thing that is present in large quantities. Sorry to say for whales, they got caught in human’s leviathan industrialization.
The fantastic thing about this book is that it also seamlessly blends in so many strands of thought, such as the like and awe of the sea, of ships and sailors, of the fishing industry, of American and World history and permanently in the background is Moby Dick, Ishmael, Melville, Captain Ahab, and additional iconic characters and locations. I have never read the Moby Dick, but you don’t have to if you have any appreciation for any the world of the sea.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5