The Whale

Being in the presence of a whale is a moving experience, and the giants of the sea have inspired many writers. Unfortunately, much writing on whales is mawkish, and far too much is derivative of MOBY-DICK. Philip Hoare made his name as a literary biographer. Much of his prose is poetic, but most of THE WHALE falls into the usual traps, weighed down by its tiresome references to Melville. Michael Page delivers Hoare's meditations with an eloquent British accent, using just the right pace to move along this work of natural history. But his tone sounds stiff and cold, a quality that amplifies the pretentiousness of the text. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 7, 2009
A young boy’s first glimpse of a whale in captivity matures into a writer’s paean to the giants of the deep in this poetic blend of nautical history, literary allusion, personal experience, and natural science by British biographer Hoare (Noël Coward
). With Melville as his mentor and Ishmael as his muse, the author haunts one-time whaling town New Bedford, Mass., America’s richest city in the mid–19th century thanks to whale oil and baleen (whalebone); recreates the cramped life on board the whalers of 200 years ago; weaves writing about whales by Emerson and Poe into his narrative; and finally revels in face-to-fin encounters with his obsession, swimming with the whales in the Atlantic. Though Hoare rhapsodizes most about the fabled sperm whale, the world’s largest predator with a history dating back 23 million years, he also describes with succinct precision other species—the beaked, blue, fin, humpback, and the killer whale, the sperm whale’s only nonhuman predator. This tour de force is a sensuous biography of the great mammals that range on and under Earth’s oceans.