ENGLISH

Leviathan or The Whale

By Philip Hoare

Book information

Publisher
Fourth Estate
Year
2009
ISBN
0007230141, 9780007230143
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
3 MB (3203160 bytes)
Edition
Trade Paperback Edition
Pages
352\0
Topic
Biology
Time added
2013-12-23 16:08:53

Description

LeviathanThe story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious.In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again.This book is an investigation into what we know little about – dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions.

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