Stepping back to observe, and attentive examination and dismantling of anthropocentrism allow better access to the whale and to overarching ecological questions.

This is part of the work’s ethical approach. Giggs only occasionally brings the first-person into focus - childhood museum whales, a vegetarian offered whale flesh, the delicious frisson of love’s inklings. The slant light of facts reveals humanity’s own animal nature. Every page has its breathtaking revelations. Giggs’ meticulous research is itself awesome. Giggs is extremely sensitive to how our 'tormented love' of cetaceans can be 'a need to connect, so dire, that it smothers the beloved'-as when she devastatingly dissects a photo of a mob in Argentina petting a baby dolphin to death. At times, there was so much analyzing of symbolic whales that I felt bereft of actual ones.

This can make certain passages feel like a literary distillation of volumes of scientific papers through which actual lobtailing, rainbow-spouting, aria-ululating whales rarely breach. For in a work about whales, there are few direct encounters with the awe-inducing leviathans basically, just the single whale-watching tour and two strandings. All this cogitation is both the overall strength and occasional weakness of the book. In the cascade of mini-essays that results, Giggs comes off as much as a cultural critic as a naturalist. she uses whales as invitations to consider everything else: the selfie-ization of environmentalism, the inherent worth of parasites, Jungian psychoanalysis, solar storms, whale songs records going multiplatinum and so much more. her journey is intellectual she relentlessly follows lines of questioning for marathon distances. she questions the conventional wisdom that all is well with whales now that conservation campaigns have helped their populations rebound.

Giggs is worth reading for her spotlight observations and lyricism alone, but she also has an important message to deliver.

Fathoms the world in the whale review