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207th out of 1,753 books
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1,539 voters
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
by
Donovan Hohn (Goodreads Author)
A revelatory tale of science, adventure, and modern myth. A New York Times Notable Book of 2011. One of NPR's Best Books of 2011. One of Janet Maslin's Ten Picks for 2011.
When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science...more
When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science...more
Hardcover, 416 pages
Published
March 3rd 2011
by Viking Adult
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I never could get all the way through Moby Dick. Maybe I'll have better luck with Moby Duck.
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Plastic Duckie, You’re the one. Well, one of 28,800 anyway.
Donovan Hohn begins his tale with an accident at sea. A container ship, in the face of fifty-foot waves, rolls sufficiently to dump more than a few containers, those box-car sized giant legos that we use to transport stuff from here to there. One such dumpee held a large quantity of plastic bath toys. Included were beavers, frogs, turtles and the most-familiar, ducks. Not rubber, mind you, but plastic. His aim is to find as many places a...more
Donovan Hohn begins his tale with an accident at sea. A container ship, in the face of fifty-foot waves, rolls sufficiently to dump more than a few containers, those box-car sized giant legos that we use to transport stuff from here to there. One such dumpee held a large quantity of plastic bath toys. Included were beavers, frogs, turtles and the most-familiar, ducks. Not rubber, mind you, but plastic. His aim is to find as many places a...more
13 likes · like · see review
Just when you think there is nothing new under the sun, along comes something totally fucking insanely surprising.
Here is a totally true story, which I am not just making up so that I will win the First Reads giveaway for this book (but please can I have this book, Goodreads Gods??): Donovan Hohn, the author of this amazingly crazy book, was doing a reading in Brooklyn on the same day that this guy was doing a reading. I srsly love The Oatmeal, and although it was a super hard choice, I went to...more
Here is a totally true story, which I am not just making up so that I will win the First Reads giveaway for this book (but please can I have this book, Goodreads Gods??): Donovan Hohn, the author of this amazingly crazy book, was doing a reading in Brooklyn on the same day that this guy was doing a reading. I srsly love The Oatmeal, and although it was a super hard choice, I went to...more
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Reading Moby Duck is an adventure worth taking, but not without its hazards. Like the journey of the lost bath toys, this book took me through channels more complex than I anticipated. I want to fault Hohn for taking sidetrips onto uncharted shores, and I want to accuse him of leaving the reader in the doldrums of the open sea. However, I can't criticize him for taking such a broad scope at times and for exploring minutea at others. Much of the charm of this book occurs when he describes a perso...more
Lesley marked this as to-read and I recalled the news story the book was based on (a shipment of bath toys gone overboard in the Pacific), so was thrilled to see the library had ordered the book.
Hohn takes a light-hearted approach to his material (and how could you not?) and almost seems to use the book proposal as an excuse to travel, but then again, he's not jetsetting with the rich and famous. Rather he crosses the Pacific on a container ship, and then travels to Alaska on the intercoastal f...more
Hohn takes a light-hearted approach to his material (and how could you not?) and almost seems to use the book proposal as an excuse to travel, but then again, he's not jetsetting with the rich and famous. Rather he crosses the Pacific on a container ship, and then travels to Alaska on the intercoastal f...more
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn proved to be a disappointing book. I had high hopes for the book as it received quite a few positive reviews both on Goodreads and in the book press in general. Unfortunately I could not get past the self-revelatory clap – trap that the author seemed hell bent on sharing whether it was relevant or not. I
...more
Moby Duck is hard to describe: part travelogue, part scientific and environmental reporting, part meditation on modern consumerism, and part journal of self-discovery and adventurism. In 1992, a container ship accident dumped over 28,000 rubber toys into the Pacific Ocean, and for years after, they washed up around the Pacific Basin and some even claimed they had floated over the Arctic into the Atlantic.This saga captures the imagination of writer Donovan Hohn, who embarks on a multiyear and tr...more
The full title of Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn is Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, which really rather nicely encapsulates what this nonfiction book is about. An accident happens at sea and a container ship accidentally dumps 28,800 plastic bath toys (7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks) into the Pacific ocean....more
A pretty disappointing book all around. Hohn had the opportunity to tell a great story about the bath toys that were lost at sea in a shipping accident, comment on the environmental threats facing our oceanic ecosystems, and tell a personal story.
Instead he threw together a horribly disjointed rant with a few funny comments here and there. Half the time he's just describing and telling the reader how he feels. The rest of the time he briefly comments on a certain topic before randomly changing...more
Instead he threw together a horribly disjointed rant with a few funny comments here and there. Half the time he's just describing and telling the reader how he feels. The rest of the time he briefly comments on a certain topic before randomly changing...more
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I spotted this last week on one of the countless best-of-2011 lists (maybe NPR's), then couldn't put it down. He uses a single container ship spill -- when thousands of colorful bath toys splashed into the Pacific and began journeys to remote Alaska beaches and elsewhere -- to illustrate what our obsession with plastics is doing to the ocean. Really strong reporting and storytelling, save for a rambling section at the end about Arctic research and save for this section that left me wanting more...more
2011 Book 104/100
This is the tale of a shipping container that is lost overboard in a storm in 1992 in the North Pacific. A container that disgorges 28,000+ small plastic bath toys (including 7000 iconic yellow rubber duckies - dare you not to get the Ernie song stuck in your head)into the ocean and on an amazing journey. A late-night chance encounter with a reference to the ducks in a student's assignment 13 years later led the author, Donovan Hohn, to begin asking questions. And he didn't stop...more
This is the tale of a shipping container that is lost overboard in a storm in 1992 in the North Pacific. A container that disgorges 28,000+ small plastic bath toys (including 7000 iconic yellow rubber duckies - dare you not to get the Ernie song stuck in your head)into the ocean and on an amazing journey. A late-night chance encounter with a reference to the ducks in a student's assignment 13 years later led the author, Donovan Hohn, to begin asking questions. And he didn't stop...more
I listened to an audio version of the book downloaded from Audible.com. In the early 1990s, a container ship in the northern Pacific encountered bad weather and lost some of the containers overboard. Some of the containers opened, releasing thousands of floating, plastic bath toys, including a red (why red?) beaver and yellow ducks. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who publishes a newsletter aimed at beachcombers, tracked the locations at which these toys were found. One toy is alleged to hav...more
The moment I saw this book available for pre-order it was added to my wish list. It was a classic case of Book By Cover Judgment. Quirky title referencing one of my all time favorites from American literature? Check. Eye catching image? Check. Overly wordy subtitle foretelling tales of travel and adventure? Bingo. Or maybe it was an equally classic case of Midwest girl being drawn in by yet another tale of the high seas. It's been known to happen. Moby Duck is exactly the sort of book I love--a...more
An in-depth study of that iconic American toy, the rubber duck! How long have we needed for this book to be written? I admit that it was the cover that got my attention, but after reading the whole title there was no way I wasn't going to read this book. Mr. Hohn follows a tale of castaway tub toys to Alaska, China, the Northwest Passage, and Hawaii, delving into the history of all kinds of things in the process. We get a look at the actual factory the toys are made in, the toy seller convention...more
I was sorely disappointed in this meandering book. I almost had to add it to my "Didn't Finish Reading" shelf, but every so often my interest was well-captured. The premise is great: Donovan Hohn heard about the container ship that spilled its contents, included 28,800 bath toys that started to wash up on shores in Alaska, and perhaps in Maine. He sets out to investigate and winds up on a journey of several years. He travels to Alaska, and joins in major beach cleanup projects, finding one of th...more
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I could be flip, and just say that this book told me more about ducks than I really wanted to know. But to be fair, there's a lot of fairly dense scientific information about plastics pollution, global warming, and ocean currents. Hohn interviewed real scientists, and a few whose science is more questionable. The information is interspersed by Hohn's thoughts on such things as the artistic representation of children, his parents' divorce, the popularity of duck breeds, his myopia, Melville, his...more
Bath toys lost at sea caught Donovan Hohn’s imagination to such an extent that he gave up his job and went off on a pilgrimage to find out what happened to them and why they ended up where they did. Twenty eight thousand plastic toys adrift in the Pacific Ocean; though there were so many of them individually they were no real hazard to shipping. They were all in packaging but this gradually disintegrated and left the toys to float free wherever wind and tide would carry them.
I’ve come across sev...more
I’ve come across sev...more
A couple weeks ago I went to a lecture by the author of Moby Duck, Donovan Hohn. I was interested in this because of a story that I remember reading a few years ago. The story was about a flotilla of 1000 ghost rubber ducks, bleached by the sun, about to invade the coast of the UK.
That story turns out to have been false, part of the growing myth surrounding the Friendly Floatees. Much like the white whale, a figment of the collective imagination.
This book tells the story, as best can be reconstr...more
That story turns out to have been false, part of the growing myth surrounding the Friendly Floatees. Much like the white whale, a figment of the collective imagination.
This book tells the story, as best can be reconstr...more
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The more jaded book critics clearly feel that the “one object and how it changed the world” and the “everything that ever happened is connected to this event” genres have jumped the shark. Yet even admitting their skepticism, they were caught up by Moby-Duck—probably because, as some of them explained, the author’s quest is in several senses quixotic (or maybe Melvillian): Hohn is a haplessly comic, hopelessly ambitious, superficially naïve, philosophical, and sophisticated writer all at once. T...more
To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi…”These were not the ducks I was looking for.”
Although very well written, I feel as if I was taken for a bait-and-switch by this book’s subtitle and dust jacket. I had assumed (perhaps my first mistake), that this work would be filled with exacting details of how these little toys were jettisoned into the ocean with a heavy peppering of tales of discovery in far off and exotic places (second mistake), and supplemented by light-to-medium science (kind of a third mista...more
Although very well written, I feel as if I was taken for a bait-and-switch by this book’s subtitle and dust jacket. I had assumed (perhaps my first mistake), that this work would be filled with exacting details of how these little toys were jettisoned into the ocean with a heavy peppering of tales of discovery in far off and exotic places (second mistake), and supplemented by light-to-medium science (kind of a third mista...more
I think Nathaniel Philbrick's review on the back of the book has the adjective right for describing this book, "quirky." But I love quirky and this book is a delightful read through a range of subjects tied together by 28,000 seafaring, plastic (not rubber!) ducks. I didn't even pick this book up; my toddler picked it up for me, her attention caught by her favorite yellow ducks on the cover. She handed it to me, "Duck!"
Hohn weaves breaking edge oceangraphy, environmentalism (or conservatism or...more
Hohn weaves breaking edge oceangraphy, environmentalism (or conservatism or...more
Perhaps you've heard the story about the container ship that lost a bunch of its cargo over the side somewhere in the North Pacific, in 1992, including 28,800 cutesy plastic bath toys, a quarter of which were, each, red beavers, blue turtles, green frogs, and, the most publicized and captivating-to-the-public (and, not incidentally, to Eric Carle, who based a book on the incident), yellow ducks? And that over the years many of these ducks (and beavers, turtles, and frogs) were discovered on far-...more
Thousands of bath floats lost at sea, and the people who found them, and tried to follow their journeys from the crate that were in, to the shores that the ended up at.
This book seemed very interesting and there were some good pieces in it, unfortunately, I was unable to finish it.
Although the book was interesting, it wasn't able to hold my attention, and I decided to maybe onto another book that I came across while at the library, which I am actually almost done with now. ...
I think that I wo...more
This book seemed very interesting and there were some good pieces in it, unfortunately, I was unable to finish it.
Although the book was interesting, it wasn't able to hold my attention, and I decided to maybe onto another book that I came across while at the library, which I am actually almost done with now. ...
I think that I wo...more
All the criticisms of this book are valid: certainly too long, by at least 100 pp., even if that's meant to be Melvillian in scope; could do with less self-absorption and lamentations of the lonely father who leaves child and wife at home, even if that's meant to echo Ishmael and/or Starbuck; attempts to make one thing about ALL things can often be clumsy. Etc., etc.
But also, much of the praise for this book is valid too. Something about it compels you to stick with it, mirroring many readers' e...more
But also, much of the praise for this book is valid too. Something about it compels you to stick with it, mirroring many readers' e...more
This is an enjoyable read, but it would have been better if the author's goal weren't so patently to think up some quest to write a book about and then go carry it out and report on it. The best quest books tell us about journeys undertaken in their own right, based on the author's (or subject's) compelling interest or need. There's none of that urgency here. Hohn covers a lot of ground (or rather, water) in an interesting way, tracking a spilled load of bath toys and drawing conclusions about o...more
This was not the book that I thought it was and I had mixed thoughts on the author. I thought it was a light hearted look at the travels of ducks but instead it was a look at the effects of plastic and global warming on our oceans and not really about the ducks. It was a good book in this light. But I had real problems with the author choosing to leave his new born son on this quixotic quest. His rationalizations seemed hollow and he seemed shallow. As a parent I just cannot understand that deci...more
This is not a book that I would normally reach for but my Step-father read it and raved about it and so I read it. Not a small undertaking since it is 300 dense pages but it was a very educational book.
I have been very careful for about fifteen years about NEVER taking a bag from a store, I always carry my own cloth bags and always have two Kleen Kanteen water bottles in my car for myself so as to never purchase plastic bottles of water but I have been known to buy the odd bottle of iced tea or...more
I have been very careful for about fifteen years about NEVER taking a bag from a store, I always carry my own cloth bags and always have two Kleen Kanteen water bottles in my car for myself so as to never purchase plastic bottles of water but I have been known to buy the odd bottle of iced tea or...more
During a winter storm in the Pacific Ocean thousands of toy ducks fall off a ship transporting them to the United States from an Asian factory. What happens next? It turns out the answer to that question is a little complicated.
Author Donovan Hohn is on a mission to find where these ducks ended up, and what it all means for our oceans and for life in the twenty-first century. This book covers a lot of territory, both literally and metaphorically, meandering from topic to topic the way the ducks...more
Author Donovan Hohn is on a mission to find where these ducks ended up, and what it all means for our oceans and for life in the twenty-first century. This book covers a lot of territory, both literally and metaphorically, meandering from topic to topic the way the ducks...more
Did not finish.
I kept expecting to learn something, but gave up. This book was obviously sold on concept and the real concept was to give the author the chance to take adventure vacations paid for by grants and an advance.
The author, who is obviously one of the privileged (no one else can afford to teach at the kind of NYC private school he taught at) pretends to be poor, which is offensive, and his reporting on other people is permeated with conceit he seems unaware of. He lost me completely w...more
I kept expecting to learn something, but gave up. This book was obviously sold on concept and the real concept was to give the author the chance to take adventure vacations paid for by grants and an advance.
The author, who is obviously one of the privileged (no one else can afford to teach at the kind of NYC private school he taught at) pretends to be poor, which is offensive, and his reporting on other people is permeated with conceit he seems unaware of. He lost me completely w...more
What began as a whim turned into a quest. The author was a mild-mannered English teacher when he heard the story of 28,800 bath toys that were swept overboard in a storm. The image of these bath toys: a beaver, a turtle, a frog and duck floating on the oceans amused and fascinated him.
Hohn decides to pursue this story, thinking he will read a few books, interview a few experts, look over some maps and write a short complete narrative. Instead he travels all over the world seeking to follow the...more
Hohn decides to pursue this story, thinking he will read a few books, interview a few experts, look over some maps and write a short complete narrative. Instead he travels all over the world seeking to follow the...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| You'll love this ...: Moby Duck Buddy Read | 31 | 22 | Oct 26, 2012 02:24am | |
| Just the Facts No...: Reading "Moby Duck" | 4 | 8 | Nov 16, 2011 11:47am | |
| CBC Books: Moby-Duck on Day 6 | 1 | 9 | May 17, 2011 01:56pm | |
| Moby-Duck | 2 | 25 | May 09, 2011 02:57pm |
Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. Moby-Duck, his first book, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism and runner-up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A former fea...more
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“The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.”
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