The Sounding of the Whale

"In the bright new age of whale science, Graham Burnett’s astounding and wide-ranging report from the front lines of cetacean studies is hugely welcome. Rooted in historical fact, political, philosophical and scientific analysis, it lays out the sorry story of the interaction of humans and whales in an era which redefined the ever uneasy meeting of natural and human history. By turns enlightening, lively and disturbing, always intuitive and drawing on a wealth of knowledge as vast as its subject, Burnett’s book is set to become a new high water mark in a still unfolding story."

"It is tempting to use big words to describe this big book--and Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale is big in terms of both size and importance. In his investigation of the creation of knowledge about whales, Burnett offers a uniquely fertile avenue into the fraught topics of modern whaling, science-based regulation, and the dramatic shift in the cultural meanings of whales during the twentieth century. The volume itself offers eloquent testimony to the centrality of historical narrative for understanding the relationship between science and regulation. Yet, despite the lesson that complexity and distinctiveness matter, deeply, for the particular case of twentieth-century whaling, Burnett’s study also illuminates durable characteristics of science-based regulation and provides analytical context for current controversies such as the scientific whaling exception or the concept of ’scientific uncertainty.’ Historians of various stripes, those who study science, the environment, politics, or culture, will find this invaluable study worthy of careful and considered attention, but so will environmental activists, political scientists, and people concerned with the history and fate of the largest creatures on our planet and their smaller marine mammalian brethren.  To use little words to describe a big book, Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale is great."

"This wonderful book documents the interplays among science, conservation and politics in the evolving career of the whale over the last century, with bravura, insight and wit, as has never been done before. Using a narrative style, it explores the thoughts and trials of the men behind the origins and activities of the Discovery Investigations, the International Whaling Commission and the save-the-whale movement. It’s scholarly history that reads like a good novel--Harmer, Kellogg, Mackintosh, Lilly, and more; they’re all here, in full. The language is marvelous: original and eloquent."

"In the early twentieth century, whale biology was restricted to the flensing decks of factory ships, where scientists were in danger of being sucked ’into the belly of the beast’ of modern whaling. Graham Burnett artfully renders the history, and the often fractious relationship, between biologists and whalers; I felt as if I had discovered a trail of ambergris meticulously arrayed along the shores of twentieth-century cetology. The Sounding of the Whale is a work of stunning scholarship and a bracing read."

"In other hands it might have yielded a story as dry as dust, but this historian has an eye for small, telling details, resulting in an intriguing book full of paradoxes and unlikely heroes."

"The heft of The Sounding of the Whale does not weigh it down, not least because Burnett takes the reader on some wonderfully strange detours. Like one of the flensers, who carved the blubber off whales, Burnett scrambles and rappels across the living and dead bodies of his subjects with aplomb."

"At once original, insightful, wide-ranging, and provocative, The Sounding of the Whale is a marvelously engrossing work of high scholarship and enduring worth."