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 counterculture 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
slaughterhouses. 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--and 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.
