February 10th – The Whale
The Whale, is an award winning non-fiction book that delves into literature, history, science, anecdote, anthropology and art to explore our long and often difficult relationship with whales. Inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, author Philip Hoare manages to dive between poetic lyrical writing and the harshest of scientific facts. Yet within these pages is so much information, from the size of sperm whale’s brain (bigger than ours) to the size of a right whale’s balls (far, far bigger than ours) to the myriad ways we have used the flesh, bone and blubber. At its heart, though, this is a prayer for the whales’ survival.
“Leviathan or, The Whale” is Hoare’s account of a lifelong obsessions with whales that began with the work of Melville and the bones in natural history museums. The book and its author recently won the Samuel Johnson Prize (20,000 pounds) – a British non-fiction book award.
“What made Leviathan stand out in a shortlist of wonderful reads was Philip Hoare’s lifelong passion for his subject and his skill in making his readers share it,” said U.S. journalist Jacob Weisberg, chair of the judging panel. “His prose is dream-like and rises to the condition of literature.”
As far as I can tell the book hasn’t been released in the US yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s a way to track it down on the interwebs.
I actually don’t have sound on this computer (my pre-Nantucket base camp), but I’m going to embed this interview with Hoare anyways (in hopes that I remember to watch it later)
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