At the end of the 1970s, one young reporter bears witness to the final days of Australia’s whaling industry. Thirty years after the last whale was captured and slaughtered in Australia, this incisive account tells the very human story of the characters and events that brought whaling to an end. This fair and balanced account portrays the raw adventure of going to sea, the perils of being a whaler, and the commitment that leads activists to throw themselves into the path of an explosive harpoon. Accompanied by a wonderful photographic record of the time, this is the action-packed history of a town reliant on whaling dollars pitted against a determined band of protesters.
Its the end of the seventies and one young reporter is bearing witness to the final days of Australias whaling industry. Thirty years after the last whale was captured and slaughtered in Australia, Chris Pash, tells the very human story of the characters and events that brought whaling to an end. This fair and balanced account portrays the raw a...
At a time when global change has eradicated thousands of unique cultures, The Last Whalers tells the inside story of the Lamalerans, an ancient tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a remote Indonesian volcanic island. They have survived for centuries by taking whales with bamboo harpoons, but now are being pushed toward collapse by the encroachment of the modern world. Journalist Doug Bock Clark, who lived with the Lamalerans across three years, weaves together their stories. Clark details how the fragile dreams of one of the world's dwindling indigenous peoples are colliding with the upheavals of our rapidly transforming world, and delivers a group of unforgettable families.
The stunning bestseller by Benji Davies, winner of the inaugural Oscar's First Book Prize. Noi and his father live in a house by the sea, his father works hard as a fisherman and Noi often has only their six cats for company. So when, one day, he finds a baby whale washed up on the beach after a storm, Noi is excited and takes it home to care for it. He tries to keep his new friend a secret, but there's only so long you can keep a whale in the bath without your dad finding out. Noi is eventually persuaded that the whale has to go back to the sea where it belongs. For Noi, even though he can't keep it, the arrival of the whale changes his life for the better - the perfect gift from one friend to another. 'A future classic and a must have for the discerning picture book fan' The Booksniffer 'The Storm Whale is an evocative portrayal of a child's need for friendship, told through the sparest of text and imagery in this beautiful picture book' The ReadingZone 'The Storm Whale is one of those rare picture books that evokes loneliness with such fragility, and that conveys such feeling and beauty that it cannot fail to move its readers… an absolute gem, do not miss out' Library Mice 'I have to admit that I was fighting back tears by the end. It's just so incredibly sweet and really pulls the heart strings!' Being Mrs C 'Charming and engaging this book gives lots of scope for child to adult discussion about feeling lonely and saying goodbye to something loved' Love All Blogs 'Poignant, sensitive and understated […] this is a not to be missed tale where the narrative thrust and emotional span transcends the simplicity of its words' Droplets of Ink Other books from the World of the Storm Whale: The Storm Whale in Winter Grandma Bird *NEW* The Great Storm Whale Also by Benji Davies: Grandad's Island On Sudden Hill, written by Linda Sarah When the Dragons Came, written by Naomi Kefford and Lynne Moore Jump on Board the Animal Train, written by Naomi Kefford and Lynne Moore
Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.
A mature male blue whale, weakened by parasites and mercury poisoning, searches for his mate and surviving calf, while remembering the events of his life
The author employs a narrative scheme as does the Matrix, the novel Moby Dick. The story cruises through the present and the historic plight of the Jews and intermittingly brings Melville's Sea-saga with the mad Capt. Ahab, his first mate, Starbuck, and others in the crew: the narrator, Ishmael, his friend, the harpooner, former head-hunter, Queequeg, and Ahab's guru-confidant, Fedallah, the Parsee mystic who tells Ahab a prophetic riddle that could match the three witches conundrum in Shakespeare's Macbeth. It features twenty mini-bios of Righteous Jews, their contribution to mankind in past and present along with histories of famous Jewish dynasties. There are instances of the author's personal experiences such as excerpts from journals kept when he toured Israel in 1979 led by Prof. Menahem Mansoor with a group of University of Wisconsin Alumni. Also, he tells of how childhood traumas were compounded from media influences and, in time, cites chilling anti-Semitic expressions while in the US Navy. He, a Christian, lauds his paternal grandfather, though he had died a generation before the author's birth. He had been a Nothern Civil War veteran, the Fire Chief of Bethlehim, PA and a Jewish Imigrant from Bavaria. It is not enunciated, but Capt. Ahab, his ship, the Pequod, his world, could represent the static mind-set of insane, unconsumated revenge, launching harpoons at this perceived enemy. But on encountering Moby Dick, he is thwarted, scattered, then annihilated. World-wide, Jews are a tiny lot and getting smaller. For Jews, extinction won't come from disturbing a sea-giant entirely, but from abandoning tradition in favor of "Reform", PC & ACLU, Absorbtion and Lethargy. On top of all that, in the wings are massive emerging eastern populations with energy and innate abilities that equal or surpass Jews. You shall be left few in numbers, whereas you were as the stars in heaven in multitude (Deut. 28: 62).
A child and a whale embark on a beautiful journey together in this lyrical, gorgeously illustrated picture book about friendship, hope, and love for the world around us in the vein of The Fisherman & the Whale and Cynthia Rylant’s Life. Where land becomes sky and sky becomes sea, I first saw the whale and the whale first saw me. A child joins a friendly whale for a magical journey of discovery. They sail the blue ocean, dance with dolphins, and tail-splash seagulls. But the child also sees an ocean filled with plastic trash. And that inspires a promise of help, for the whale and all earth’s creatures.
The fascinating story of North Atlantic right whales—from their evolutionary origin, through a thousand-year history of relentless pursuit by whalers, to ongoing efforts to rescue them from the brink of extinction. In the cold waters of the unforgiving North Atlantic Ocean, some of the heartiest humans of medieval days ventured out in search of whales. Through the centuries, people on both sides of the Atlantic became increasingly dependent on whale oil and other cetacean products. To meet this growing demand, whaling became ever more sophisticated and intense, leading to the collapse of what was once a seemingly inexhaustible supply of large cetaceans. Central to the whale's subsequent struggle for existence has been one species—the North Atlantic right whale. Conservationist David W. Laist now provides the first complete history of the North Atlantic right whale, from its earliest encounters with humans to its close brush with extinction, to its currently precarious yet hopeful status as a conservation icon. Favored by whalers because of their high yields of oil and superior baleen, these giants became known as "the right whale to hunt," and their numbers dwindled to a mere 100 individuals worldwide. Their dire status encouraged the adoption of a ban on hunting and a treaty that formed the International Whaling Commission. Recovery of the species, however, has proven elusive. Ship strikes and entanglement in commercial fishing gear have hampered herculean efforts to restore the population. Today, only about 500 right whales live along the US and Canadian Atlantic coasts—an improvement from the early twentieth century, but still a far cry from the thousands that once graced Atlantic waters. Laist's masterpiece features an incredible collection of photographs and artwork that give life to the fascinating history that unfolds in its pages. The result is a single volume that offers a comprehensive understanding of North Atlantic right whales, the role they played in the many cultures that hunted them, and our modern attempts to help them recover.
