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<p>&nbsp;</p> <p>From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery.</p> <p>In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with <i>The Sounding of the Whale</i>, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even <i>Nature</i> was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were qua

Author

D. Graham Burnett

Publisher

The University of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press

Published

2012

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226100579

Subjects

History, Nature, Biology

Rating

3.88 / 5 (31 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14