Richard Ellis

Men and Whales, Knopf 1991

The shadowy figure of Leviathan has haunted the dreams of humans for millennia, figuring in the folklore, literature, and religion of many cultures. Richard Ellis, a noted marine artist and the author of many popular books on oceanographic topics, here offers an in-depth but readily accessible study of the human quest to understand whales--a quest that often found expression in hunting them. The whale road led the ancient Basques, Ellis writes, to cross the Atlantic 500 years before Columbus; it spawned a great New England-based industry that helped the United States to become a seagoing power in the 19th century (and that produced one of America's greatest novels, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick); and it ultimately led to conflicts between nations, as some industrial powers sought to protect the great marine mammals while others continued to hunt them nearly to extinction. Ellis's book is among the finest in the library devoted to cetaceans; he packs an astonishing array of folklore, anthropology, history, and science into these 500 richly illustrated pages (and the photographs and drawings alone are worth the book's price). Noting with regret that "most of the accumulated knowledge of the animals has come from those who have killed them," Ellis overlooks nothing that even remotely touches upon these giants of the deep, and the well-written story that emerges is full of respect and affection for humans and whales alike. --Gregory McNamee, Amazon.com

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