The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea

There is a reason this book won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction... it is an exceptionally good read while being highly educational! "The Whale" is NOT a scientific treatise on whales yet there are enough facts and details about whales to satisfy just about any level of whale enthusiast and the many illustrations are just an added bonus. Philip Hoare deeply admires and respects whales and perhaps is even obsessed with them. It is this passion for his subject that gives the book its "hook" as it literally grabs you and pulls you along for the ride. Hoare tries very hard to seperate fact from fiction as it pertains to our knowledge of whales. He uses Herman Melville's classic "Moby Dick" as a stepping stone to do this. By referencing passages from the book as well as other historical journals and events that Melville might have used to source his story Hoare provides a dramatic history of the whale, the whaling industry and the tenuous relationship that whales and men have had over the past 400+ years! This provides some of the best and most riveting writing in the book. "You are there" as a sailor yells "there she blows" and the crew goes into action to chase and catch the whale. But throughout Hoare provides specific and fascinating details about each species of whale that he introduces: from Narwhals, Belugas, Bowheads to the grandaddy of them all... the Sperm whale! Hoare tells of why whales were so in demand during the 18th and 19th century and why men would travel to the four corners of the earth risking death to catch them and bring home the spoils while he also tells of the naturalists and the scientists who made it their life's work to go on expeditions to study whales and their world. Hoare takes us into the 20th century and the almost indiscriminate slaughter of whales to again satisfy the need for their by products... one of which was as a base ingredient for the manufacture of nitro glycerine during the world wars! For a man who as a child feared the sea and would not step anywhere near the waters edge... Philip Hoare has become a champion of Whales and our understanding of them. This book is a tremendous tribute to that giant of the- THE WHALE!

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 true. What it is a very literary, easy to read, yet fact filled musing about the whole subject of whales and whaling. There is not any overly emotional, hand wringing or politicization of the subject, yet the author 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 good use for any thing that is present in large quantities. Unfortunately for whales, they got caught in human's leviathan industrialization. The great thing about this book is that it also seamlessly blends in so many strands of thought, such as the love and awe of the sea, of ships and sailors, of the fishing industry, of American and World history and always in the background is Moby Dick, Ishmael, Melville, Captain Ahab, and other 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.

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...". However, 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 profoundly 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

Philip Hoare became fascinated by whales as a child, and that interest deepened with his great 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 (unfortunately, the dominant traditional mode of interaction between humans and whales), and about his own personal journey to learn and understand. "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 understand whales. The book is not a dry compendium of biological details, although certainly there are numerous 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 immersion 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 forth 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 motorized -- as depicted in gory detail by the author was instead a horror appropriate for an industrialized Dante's "Inferno". To balance the melancholy story of whale hunting, however, the author 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.

This wide-ranging paean to the world's largest mammals had its origins in fear. As a boy, British biographer Hoare was terrified of water; his imagination reeling at the depths his eyes could not fathom. Nevertheless, in his mid-20s he determined to learn to swim. "In the chilly East End pool, built between the wars, I discovered that the water could bear up my body. I realized what I had been missing; the buoyancy of myself." He still wasn't ready to obsess about the whale for our benefit; he still found his attention wandering from the density of Herman Melville's Moby Dick despite repeated attempts. It wasn't until his first visit to New England and his first sight of a finback on a whale watch out of Provincetown that Hoare was hooked by the majesty of Leviathan. He dove into Moby-Dick with new eyes and prepared to follow the whale himself, guided by Melville and his own curiosity. "Now, as I came to it again, I saw that Moby Dick is a book made mythic by the whale, as much as it made a myth of the whale in turn." Hoare muses on Moby Dick's abject failure to stir the collective imagination during Melville's lifetime and the classic status it has since achieved. "Each time I read it, it is as if I am reading it for the first time....Every day I am reminded that it is part of our collective imagination; from newspaper leaders that evoke Ahab in the pursuit of the war on terror, to the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops named after the Pequod's first mate, Starbuck..." A biographer at heart, Hoare (Noel Coward, Wilde's Last Stand) uses Melville's life as a springboard into 19th century whaling. Coming from a solidly middle class background of revolutionary heroes, Indian fighters and seafarers, Melville ran away to sea at 19. His second sea journey was on a whaler out of New Bedford. Hoare gives us the seaman's life - the cramped, efficient quarters, the pay and food, the work, the clothing. He explores New Bedford. "To look at it now, you would not guess that New Bedford was once the richest city in America." The book seems effortlessly organized as the author shifts among Melville's adventures and friendships and disappointments, the dangers, rewards and myths of the whaling life, the uses of whales and their architecture, biology and evolution, all of it seamlessly intertwined throughout the book. We learn about ambergris and spermaceti, about the tactile sensuousness of shipboard oil pressing. There is a tremendous wealth of information - facts, myths, literary allusions, history, political scheming, science, culture, biography, and more, and all of it is integrated, fascinating and necessary. Hoare quotes liberally from Moby Dick, sharing vivid stories and accounts of whaling that Melville himself read and used; the tales of sea monsters and whales who fought back, the lives and ships lost, the whales harpooned, killed and harvested. If Melville's classic and the whales themselves anchor the book, its connecting digressions loosely