From the Bible's ''Canst thou raise leviathan with a
hook?'' to Captain Ahab's ''From Hell's heart I stab at
thee!,'' from the trials of Job to the legends of
Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as
looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and
mystery. In the twentieth century, however, our
understanding of and relationship to these superlatives
of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with
''The Sounding of the Whale'', D. Graham Burnett tells
the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans
from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs
of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity,
bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally,
totems of the counter-culture in the Age of Aquarius.
When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even
Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the
century, and the only biological study of the species
was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughter-houses.But in
the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to
bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led
to an explosion of global research-regulations that,
while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by
whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that
continues to this day. The book closes with a look at
the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales
that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and
new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make
whales an object of sentimental concern and public
adulation. A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a
decade of research, ''The Sounding of the Whale'' tells
a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple
human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see
these behemoths from below. |
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