Leviathan or, The Whale

Summary

A wide-ranging meditation on the whale — its natural history, its role in human culture, its place in literature from Melville to Darwin — that draws together science, personal memoir, and close literary analysis into a single sustained act of inquiry. Hoare's research included swimming alongside sperm whales in the open ocean, and that physical encounter with his subject gives the book an unusual sensory immediacy. Part biography of a species, part homage to Moby-Dick, the book became a touchstone for a new kind of nature writing that refuses the boundaries between the personal and the scientific.