Journalist Susan Casey joins a strange band of surfer-scientists on a
remote island off the California coast for some close encounters with
the jaws of the world's most mysterious and fearsome predators in the
New York Times bestseller, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of
Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks.
Susan Casey was in her living room when she first saw the great white
sharks of the Farallon Islands, their dark fins swirling around a small
motorboat in a documentary. These sharks were the alphas among alphas,
some longer than twenty feet, and there were too many to count; even
more incredible, this congregation was taking place just twenty-seven
miles off the coast of San Francisco.
In a matter of months, Casey was being hoisted out of the early-winter
swells on a crane, up a cliff face to the barren surface of Southeast
Farallon Island-dubbed by sailors in the 1850s the "devil's teeth."
There she joined Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle, the two biologists who
bunk down during shark season each fall in the island's one habitable
building, a haunted, 135-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull
guano. Two days later, she got her first glimpse of the famous,
terrifying jaws up close and she was instantly hooked; her fascination
soon yielded to obsession-and an invitation to return for a full season.
But as Casey readied herself for the eight-week stint, she had no way of
preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands
that have banished every campaign for civilization in the past two
hundred years.
The Devil's Teeth is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a
story of crossing the boundary between society and an untamed place
where humans are neither wanted nor needed.
