Leviathan Or The Whale by Philip Hoare

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Whales, Philip Hoare says, are awesome: the biggest creatures on earth, and, in some ways, the most mysterious. They've been around longer than us but we've only known about them for a short part of our history, and we don't have much idea about what they do in the deeper parts of the ocean. Inspired partly by Herman Melville, Hoare has written a brilliant book which has won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It's a sort of antidote to Moby-Dick. Unlike Captain Ahab, he wishes the great beasts well.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

An extraordinary journey into the underwater world of the whale -- to tie in with a BBC film-length documentary hosted also by the author. Moby Dick is a book made mythic by its whale; but the reverse is also true. After Melville published his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again. Melville created a modern myth out of an already legendary beast. But what is the true nature of the whale? Why does it fascinate us? All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed with these creatures, from the huge skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales haunt him, as they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and other antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In 'Leviathan', he seeks to locate and identify that obsession. Why does the whale so vividly inhabit our imaginations? Is it a symbol of Edenic innocence in a time of threatened species and climate change? Or an older emblem of evil, the grotesque fish which swallowed Jonah?Travelling around the globe in search of the whale, Philip Hoare sheds light on our perennial fascination with the strange creatures of the sea, whose nature remains tantalizingly undiscovered.