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"The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea" (HarperCollins, 453 pages, $27.99), by Philip Hoare: A subject as big as the whale demands a book as broad as "The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea." Part memoir, part nature writing and part literary criticism, the book takes readers around the world for an exhaustive look at the mysterious mammal.

Author Philip Hoare begins his book tracing the steps of Herman Melville's Ishmael, visiting the famous 19th-century whaling ports Nantucket and New Bedford, Mass., before tracing the cultural significance of the whale from Jonah to "Free Willy."

Hoare is an unabashed lover of the order Cetacea. "They are animals before the Fall, innocent of sin," he writes. But he manages to never stray too far into sentimentality, opting instead to explain in graphic detail the various ways man has hunted whales throughout history.

A book this big does have its dull moments. Readers who don't love science may find themselves glossing over sentences like, "With its baroque, glossy body encrusted with callosities, its paddle-shaped flipper and its bizarre, yawning mouth filled with baleen, Eubalaena glacialis is both grotesque and wondrous, the stuff of ancient engravings."

 

 

Hoare is at his best when he inserts himself into his quest to know everything about whales, including his description of snorkeling 30 feet away from a sperm whale in the Azores.

At times entertaining and always educational, "The Whale" is an all-encompassing look at how an animal most people never see has impacted our history and inspired our imagination.

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