Yet Being Someone Other

Laurens van der Post takes the reader back to a lost world of marine beauty in South Africa, where drifts of seabirds filled the skies and whales were so plentiful that no one could imagine they could ever be decimated. He describes what it was like, for him as a boy, to work on a whaling ship, and recounts many startling stories of the tales told then about marine life, which one never hears of today. Battles between giant squid and sperm whales, giant squid witnessed pulling over a small ship, the psychological play between the whaling captain and the sea, and many more thought-provoking situations, are all described in this author's unique and insightful style. It is a jewel of a book and well worth reading, if only to learn what it was like on the sea a hundred years ago and more.