Leviathan or, The Whale, by Philip Hoare
On the beautiful jacket of this book, a whale disappears from view. Its blue flukes are all that are left behind as its body slips away unseen. That tail-only view has become what we know of the whale. It is the picture of our ignorance. We don’t know how long whales live. We don’t really know how many there are. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know what their clicks and creaks mean. Nor what damage the three or four centuries of hunting has done to their social networks, or to their understanding of their oceanic world. We know next to nothing about them. Philip Hoare’s new and voluminous book about them is, in that way, a long exploration of an absence.
That isn’t how it was. Whales used to be to hand.
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