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Leviathan

By (author) Philip Hoare

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This edition does not include illustrations. The story of a manâ€™s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey â€“ from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in Londonâ€™s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality â€“ they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In â€˜Leviathanâ€™, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write â€˜Moby-Dickâ€™? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again. This book is an investigation into what we know little about â€“ dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions.