Such a sublime, terrible beauty, the shark. Glidingly filled with our awe, as if those glassy eyes marked us out as a bite-sized snack from the start. Evolutionarily pre-lapsarian — they’ve been around for 450 million years — sharks are wreathed in a symbolic cruelty, theirs and ours. In one of the most vivid scenes in Moby-Dick, the whalers slice into sharks attempting to prey upon their prized whale catch; yet even as the fishes’ entrails spill out, the dying animals are so ferocious that they eat their own innards. It’s a terrifying, almost Jungian image of consumption that seems to echo the reality of their fate.
William McKeever’s book seeks to dispel these fearful dreams. Taking four species of shark — great white, mako, tiger and hammerhead — he starts with the first emperor of the sea, the great white. Prowling the east coast of the USA, this ultimate predator begat its own modern myth in 1916, when a spate of shark attacks on bathers on the New Jersey shores set in motion the prejudiced story that would culminate in Peter Benchley’s Jaws.
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