Wake of the Whale

by Kenneth Brower

For more than ten years, William R. Curtsinger has specialized in photographing marine mammals. No one else in the world has produced a body of work on them anything like it. His photographs are the kind that make you wonder how in the world they were taken. Sidney Holt's introduction, drawn from his decades of experience with the politics and biology of the sea, gives the scientist's view of the so-called rational exploitation of living marine resources, and concludes that "the state of the art of assessing the state of the whale consists of some hard data, soft theory, a little knowledge, and a heap of speculation." Wake Of The Whale has the power, we hope, to prevent a wake for the whale, for other cetaceans, and for their distant relatives, including ourselves.

160 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1979

About the author

Kenneth Brower is an American nonfiction writer. He is the oldest son of the late environmentalist David R. Brower.

He is best known for his many books about the environment, national parks, and natural places, many of them in hundreds of libraries and by major publishers, including several titles in the series The Earth's Wild Places published by the Friends of the Earth in the 1970s. His most widely read book, on Yosemite, is in over 1200 worldCat libraries. Many of his books have been published by The National Geographic Society. Several of his books have been translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Hebrew.

He is also known for being the author of The Starship and the Canoe, a comparison of the lives of scientist Freeman Dyson and his 'rebellious' son George Dyson.
(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Oznasia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has been in my family library for forty years. I decided it was time to read it from cover to cover.

Is the book about whales? Well it is just as much, or perhaps more, about William Curtsinger, a photographer of marine mammals who the author travelled with for some time to various parts of the world. Brower tells stories of Curtsinger’s encounters with many of these mammals and also fish, not just whales. The stories are accompanied by many of Curtsinger’s pictures. Some of them are great but I guess that for many species more recent and more interesting photos can now be found online.

[Koeeoaddi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great big whale book. Full of great big whales.