Fathoms

How can you not already love these underwater giants? But I didn’t know much about them before reading Gigg’s love letter to our undersea cousins. They live by breathing air and giving birth like we do, but most of their lives takes place in a hidden, watery world.

The horror our species inflicted on whales during commercial whaling became more repulsive as Giggs uncovered the layers of whales’ complexity and sociality. I learned that arthritis sufferers in the nineteenth century would bathe in holes cut into whale carcasses for their curative powers. I also tried to imagine an animal with… show more.

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.

Fathoms is a remarkable narrative about the human relationship with whales, and how our understanding of that relationship lends insight to both the human condition, the state of the oceans, and of course, the survival of whales. While reading Fathoms you will learn a great deal about how you perceive nature, and how whales are a barometer for that insight. You will experience both the compassion and savagery of humanity, and you will ponder questions about the meaning of life. Fathoms is wide-ranging, and includes great insights about how technology changes our relationship to the natural world, and our understanding… show more.

I used to think of whales as a great success story in the history of humans and our plundering of the ocean – after all, these fabulous beasts were swiftly transformed from a heavily hunted, industrial resource into protected, cherished wildlife. But as we are learning more all the time, things are more complicated than that in the ocean. As Giggs eloquently tells us, humanity has replaced whaling with many other modern troubles for the great whales. Her writing is vivid and fresh, at times a sweeping personal narrative, for instance as she contemplates a dying whale stranded on an… show more.