The Blue Whale

by George L. Small

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231032889
• ISBN13: 9780231032889
• Release Date: September 1978
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Long ago

When I read this book I was still a young man. It must have been pretty good, given that I am now in my 70's and it is still stuck in memory. I picked it off the library shelf thinking it to be something of a sea adventure--perhaps a Herman Melville redux. Dumb, but it got me started. When I put it down I was changed forever. I already had a sufficient awe and love of nature, but this was before the environmental swell of the seventies. I was as naive as the next person about the peril of natural systems under industrial exploitation. I think what made the book so effective was its lack of sermonizing. It was a history, a narrative, an analysis, an introduction to the phenomenon of whaling and its main national actors, an account of the failed attempts at regulation, and the appalling effects it was having on a great specie. The author must have been distressed about the subject, to have invested so much research in it, but he wasted no ink pandering to his feelings. I felt as though I had to develop my own anger over the sly ways nations evaded agreements they had entered into with the international whaling community. When Japan "discovered" a new smaller specie of blue whale that was outside international sanctions, his chapter in response was not a rousing speech before Parliament, but careful reportage, peeling away fraud. The new specie was just immature blue whales.