Fathoms: The World in the Whale

"This is beautifully written, really elegant. It’s a disquieting book, I would say. It made me think about whales a lot in a way that I hadn’t before. It’s compelling. There is a lot of information and it’s quite dense in part, but it’s clearly expressed. “We’ve done a lot of talking and not a lot of doing” Some of the things you read are shocking, some are absolutely fascinating. There’s a world in a whale’s stomach—they found plant pots and all sorts of things. Again, a little bit like Entangled Life , it’s about the interconnectedness of things. The book talks about a whale fall, which is when a whale dies and it falls to the bottom of the sea, and the process of that, but also about all the other things that happen that rely on that whale being there and dying. It’s about the interconnections in nature that you just don’t really think about. If they’re mucked up, we then have to think about them because we’ve broken something. Yes, from hunting them, to where they are now, to eating them to not eating them. It’s amazing."