The type of book that constantly references other works, saddling up beside better written expressions, but ultimately makes me think it has very little original voice or purpose. Treats Melville's grand allegorical treatises as grounds for factual discussion of the whale in a way that makes me like Moby Dick less. As if Moby Dick were some kind of version of the Bible for fundamentalist literary types. Also makes me kind of hate whales, which is ridiculous because they are so clearly great. This is, first and foremost, a love letter to the whale. At times it feels like an expansive epic poem, full of feeling, but it teaches too. I learnt a great deal about whales from reading this book, more than any nature documentary could afford, and more still about their complicated relationship with us humans.At one point in Leviathan the author Philip Hoare explains that the Minke Whale was named after Miencke, an eminent Norwegian sailor, and laments the fact that "whales are named for their usefulness to man, rather than for their innate beauty." Much of this book is taken up with delineating how the development of the modern Western world, from the growth of the American nation to the British Industrial Revolution, was hugely dependent on the industrialised hunting of whales. Hoare holds the whaling nations of the world to account for the irreparable damage they have wrought on every species of whale and dolphin, exposing the opportunistic greed evident in the killing these creatures, whose emotional intelligence is thought by some to suppase our own.Yet Leviathan also, perhaps unavoidably, encounters whales by way of a human perspective. Hoare's phenomenological approach recalls Sebald in its constantly shifting amalgam of styles and genres. It is at once a natural history of the whale, a history of whaling, a literary study of Moby Dick, a biography of Herman Melville, a personal memoir, an Atlantic-spanning travelogue, a conservationist's polemic, the list goes on. My only criticism might be that sometimes the attitudes that come with these varying approaches seem to clash. For instance, it's hard not to romanticise the life of Melville as a young 19th Century whaler sailing the Southern Pacific, as Hoare does, but this doesn't quite sit right with the criticisms of whaling in that period found elsewhere. Still, Hoare seems aware of his own limitations as a human in ever really knowing whales as he, and we, wish we could. In one memorable passage he recalls the unnerving experience of catching the eye of a passing whale, and feeling laid bare by its uncanny gaze. For those who, like me, are fanatical about all things cetacean, this book is a real treat, but it's whale-esque drift may prove trying for some.
Do You like book Leviathan, Or The Whale (2009)?
I had a hard time finishing this, almost read like a dissertation on Moby Dick
—KINGJOHN8890
Brilliant book about whales & Melville's "Moby Dick"
—Smurphy
