The Breath of a Whale

April 8, 2019
These intimate but sometimes off-putting musings from naturalist Calvez (The Hidden Lives of Owls) on her cetacean experiences over two decades wander too heavily into her personal frustrations and problems. Although the ethological information she shares is detailed and well-presented, reflecting her background as a researcher for the Ocean Mammal Institute, she is explicit about now identifying as a writer and not a scientist after becoming disillusioned with the government’s lack of response to her studies of the disruptive effect on whale populations of the U.S. Navy’s use of low-frequency sonar. Nevertheless, her credulous mentions of other people’s theories that whales communicate across “unseen morphic fields, like invisible magnetic or gravitational fields,” and that dolphins are from other star systems, and her own theory about speaking to whales from inside her mind, will strike rational-minded readers as deeply questionable. Detailed accounts of her involvement in tagging expeditions express the immediacy of the experience of respectfully following the whales, but are marred by bland reconstructed dialogue between Calvez and her human colleagues. This memoir of mammalian encounters skirts a space between activist inspiration and spiritual memoir, and misses both marks.