I began as a journalist and turned into a novelist who uses extensive research to build my imagined stories. So, I tend to end up writing novels about whatever is fascinating enough to send me down research rabbit holes. I’m finishing a novel now about the wonders and mysteries of whales and the researchers who commit their lives to try to understand them. During the last three years, I have interviewed whale researchers, gone on expeditions with them, and have read countless scientific papers and quite a few books on whales. These books I’m recommending here were some of my favorites.
One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley, a speed-reading, Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac out looking for tidal specimens in Puget Sound, discovers…
Leviathan is an incredibly well written book about Hoare’s own fascination with whales and Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s intense whale-driven masterpiece. Hoare captures whales in words as well as anybody. “The whale is a miracle of marine engineering,” he writes, and then explains both their biological wonders as well as their psychological impact on us. “There is a supernatural physicality to them… They look like we feel as we float in our dreams.”
The story of a man's obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey - from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.
All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality - they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious.
In 'Leviathan', Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write 'Moby-Dick'? After…
Bortolotti’s book reveals the beguiling fact that we don’t know much about the largest animals to ever live on earth. Despite their hugeness, blue whales remain elusive and mysterious creatures. Most of the whales’ calls to each other operate at frequencies below our hearing range. Their breeding and migration patterns remain unpredictable compared to other whales. This book drops the reader into a small inflatable Zodiac out in the ocean looking for and studying these whales with several of the world’s most accomplished and tenacious blue whale researchers.
The blue whale holds the title of largest creature that has ever lived, and it may also be the most mysterious. The biggest blue whales can outweigh every player in Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League combined. Their mouths can gulp more than thirteen thousand gallons of seawater. A newborn can be over twenty feet long and gain nearly twenty tons in seven months—about eight pounds per hour. Blue whales emit more powerful sounds than any other animal on earth, though many of their vocalizations are beyond the range of human hearing. Yet nearly everything that we have…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
The Presence of Whales includes more than twenty different articles, essays, and excerpts about whales, including work from famous nature writers like Diane Ackerman and Farley Mowat, as well as seminal pieces from whale scientists Hal Whitehead and Roger Payne. Barry Lopez’s story about 36 sperm whales stranding on the Oregon coast alone is worth the price of this book—if you can find it. Here’s Lopez describing a sperm whale: “Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim shiny black animal with a white jaw and marbled belly cutting the surface of green ocean water at twenty knots.”
Frank Stewart, an observer, writer, storyteller, and lover of whales gathers the most compelling contemporary essays on cetaceans in the first anthology to bring together many of the foremost marine scientists and nature writers, including Diane Ackerman, Barry Lopez, Farley Mowat, Faith McNulty, and Jonathan White.
The essays are organized in five sections that celebrates our ongoing fascination with these fragile giants.
Sharing the World of Giants
contains essays inspired by being in the presence of whales,
Songs from the Deep
concentrates on whale vocalizations,
Sightings of the Leviathan
are compelling accounts of personal observations of whale behavior,
Kelsey’s book is a graceful mix of science and personal odyssey. She hangs out with whale scientists and asks smart questions. Her subjects are as much the scientists as the whales, including Chris Clark who studies the acoustics of whales and our increasingly noisy oceans. She takes us on her personal journey to the last page where she concludes that whales “inspire me to act more generously.”
Personal, anecdotal, and highly engaging, "Watching Giants" opens a window on a world that seems quite like our own, yet is so different that understanding it pushes the very limits of our senses. Elin Kelsey's colorful first-person account, drawing from her rich, often humorous, everyday experiences as a mother, a woman, and a scientist, takes us to the incredibly productive waters of the Gulf of California and beyond, to oceans around the world. Kelsey brings us along as she talks to leading cetacean researchers and marine ecologists about their intriguing discoveries. We encounter humpback whales that build nets from bubbles,…
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica — the GR20, Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath — to challenge what it means to grow old. Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The…
Giggs is first and foremost a great writer. Her powers of description and analysis pop off the page. The first 100 pages of Fathoms are particularly strong as she zeroes in on disturbing and fascinating topics such as all our garbage showing up in the bellies of stranded whales or scavenger ecosystems created by whale carcasses once they fall to the ocean floor.
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
WINNER OF THE NIB LITERARY AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON GLOBAL CONSERVATION
A SUNDAY INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
'There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change ... Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours. Once more, animals are a moral force.'
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of…
One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley, a speed-reading, Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac out looking for tidal specimens in Puget Sound, discovers a giant squid stranded on the beach. As the first person to see a giant squid alive, he finds himself hailed as a prophet. But Miles is really just a kid on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting away from him. As the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
Unsettled weather has caused life-threatening rip currents to sprout up seemingly at random in the usually tranquil sea around Grand Cayman. Despite posted warnings to stay out of the surf, several women lose their life when caught in the turbulent waters. Fin attempts some dangerous rescues, and nearly loses her…
