Jessica's Reviews > Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures

Very readable, at times more simplistic than I'd like. I often wanted it to go more in depth than it did, with either detailed facts or interpretive insights, but I'm reminded of something Melville wrote, along the lines of how the "mighty subject" of the whale can hardly be contained in any limited medium (although I may be conflating several quotations there). The unknowable! the sublime! And yet, scientists today do their best to gather and piece together relevant data to solve the never-ending mysteries of these leviathans. I appreciated how this book legitimizes a layperson's aesthetic/shallow interest in whales ("wow big! wow deep!") like my own, with scientific questions and facts underlining why we should be fascinated by the biology of how big they are, by how far they range across the globe, by their longevity and long history, by the mysteries of the ocean as an under-explored hinterland. The book is not just about whales, but about geological time, ecological webs, global weather patterns, centuries of human history -- whales are a product of their context on a grand scale, which is what makes them such a "mighty subject" beyond their fascinations as individuals. In another life I would most certainly be a biologist.

3.5, rounded up mostly because of how jazzed I am about whales and because it reminds me how much I want to reread Moby Dick some day.