Sullivan tries not to take sides, but his sympathies are apparent. Animal rights activists come across as committed yet arrogant and self-righteous. For instance, the husband-and-wife founders of In the Path of Giants, a touring company and antiwhaling advocacy group, believe they can convince the Makah, with the aid of a slideshow, to take up whale watching instead of hunting, adding, "We can help them." More interesting to Sullivan than the controversy, however, is "what it would be like to try to kill a bus-sized mammal." He conveys the wonder of the Makah's enterprise (hunt a whale? in a canoe?) as well as the mundane chores (find the right harpoon shaft, pass a swimming test, practice paddling). It is this accumulation of detail rather than the politics or the acrimony that brings the book to life. Anchoring it is a narrative structure borrowed (with a few winks) from Moby-Dick as well as a series of footnotes drawing parallels between Melville's masterpiece and the Makah's endeavor.
Sullivan also aims a few of his own harpoons--primarily at the media leviathan--as rhetoric increasingly rules the day in the weeks and months leading up to the kill. "We're not any different from any other community in the world," remarks a tribal member, "except that now everybody's watching us." Despite the close focus, Sullivan suggests that one of the many ironies of global connectivity and media saturation is an even greater distancing between one and the other, expertly parodying this distance in the final moments before the kill:
With the whaling canoe moving closer and closer to one whale, with the specter of this whale moving closer and closer to the surface ... with the whale hunt about to become an actuality, a done deed, the morning television host announced the following to the commuter at home, as if he were calling a prizefight or watching the police chase a runaway car: "Time is clearly running out for this whale."
Indeed, there is a sense of the clock running out for everyone involved. A wistfulness for times gone by permeates A Whale Hunt like a coastal fog that will not lift. The land, marred by clearcuts and oil spills, is not what it used to be; the legendary salmon runs are nearly gone, victims of dams, overfishing, development; the tribal members are searching in vain for jobs and meaning. It is an altered landscape, inhabited by an altered tribe trying to hold on to the last vestiges of its once-great history. --Langdon Cook
]]>Plato was the one who first reported the existence of a vast island with immense mountains, verdant valleys and fruit "fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance." This magnificent Aegean Eden surrounded a capital of fabulous stone buildings, a busy, bustling heaven on earth.
And then, the Cataclysm. Panic spread across the island as Atlantis's volcano shook off its long dormancy. The mountain erupted, and the island was overwhelmed, engulfed. The sea smoothed over, and the continent and its occupants were gone forever.
Or were they?
Enter Robert Sullivan, who first rose to international prominence with his breakthrough research on Santa Claus. In Atlantis Rising, Sullivan reveals evidence even more startling than that contained in his myth-shattering Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission. Set upon his Atlantean quest by Amos S. Eno, executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and lured further and further on by the mysterious oceanographer who calls himself "Atwater," Sullivan is able to separate historical truth from mere legend, fact from fiction, science from silliness. Delving into the historical record, then into secret files that have long been under lock and key at the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he discovers rare transcripts, documents, maps and, incredibly, photographs. They are all here in Atlantis Rising, along with dozens of paintings by the renowned natural-history artist Glenn Wolff. It adds up to an astonishing tale and a powerful moral.
Atlantis lives.
]]>