You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
11corvus11 's review for:
I received this via goodreads giveaways and finally got around to it. I think this book might be more aptly named "Digging Up Whales" as it is really a paleontology text. Paleontology is not super interesting to me so the volume of it here bored me a bit. There were pros and cons to this book which is why I settled at 3 stars.
Pros:
The book is stylistically well written and researched.
If you like paleontology, you'll perhaps appreciate the book's focus.
It gave me a better understanding of museums and their role in accessible science as well as more of an understanding of whale evolution and behavior.
Most research mentioned in the book is done on non-captive animals or fossils so the book is not a long snuff piece of whale torture and suffering for scientific interest.
The author discusses whales and other animals having culture, but is too restrictive in the species he assumes also have culture- which, as defined in the book, is widespread among many if not all animals in some way or another.
Cons:
I was bored until the last quarter when the author finally moved outside paleontology alone. The author spends more time on exhaustive, repetitive descriptions of bones and acquiring bones that could be better spent on a wider berth of knowledge. He sometimes repeats the same information about whale evolution and bones as if he forgot that he mentioned it already, often more than once. I've read books by paleontologists who are capable of seeing and including much more information outside their field and understanding what details to cut out.
The author hangs out with commercial whalers and chops up those they kill for science. He once remarks with excitement that they're dissecting someone hundreds of years old, ignoring the fact that she was just killed and could have lived longer. She was alive because she survived an earlier attack by humans, only to be killed by another group of humans who gleefully celebrated her death.
Discussion of nonhuman animal intelligence uses humans as the reference point, rather than looking at animal intelligence on its own. This is very common- we ignore the ways they're better and smarter than us unless we can use it as a thing to exploit, while focusing intentionally on the ways we see ourselves as superior. Many of our tests that do use us as a reference are very flawed. The spot test, for instance, assumes the animal cares if there's a spot there (something unrelated to intelligence.)
Better discussions climate change and depleted ecosystems due to hunting and exploitation of nonhuman animals by humans show up at the end. But, I still found the author to be too disconnected ethically from the whales he's writing about. Humans are emotional beings and pure objectivity is impossible. Thus the disregard for the desires and suffering of animals is usually self centeredness or even sadism (though I did not see the latter in this author's writing.)
I would recommend this book if you're really into paleontology or so into whales you can sit through it. Otherwise, skipping to the last third of the book might be best.
Pros:
The book is stylistically well written and researched.
If you like paleontology, you'll perhaps appreciate the book's focus.
It gave me a better understanding of museums and their role in accessible science as well as more of an understanding of whale evolution and behavior.
Most research mentioned in the book is done on non-captive animals or fossils so the book is not a long snuff piece of whale torture and suffering for scientific interest.
The author discusses whales and other animals having culture, but is too restrictive in the species he assumes also have culture- which, as defined in the book, is widespread among many if not all animals in some way or another.
Cons:
I was bored until the last quarter when the author finally moved outside paleontology alone. The author spends more time on exhaustive, repetitive descriptions of bones and acquiring bones that could be better spent on a wider berth of knowledge. He sometimes repeats the same information about whale evolution and bones as if he forgot that he mentioned it already, often more than once. I've read books by paleontologists who are capable of seeing and including much more information outside their field and understanding what details to cut out.
The author hangs out with commercial whalers and chops up those they kill for science. He once remarks with excitement that they're dissecting someone hundreds of years old, ignoring the fact that she was just killed and could have lived longer. She was alive because she survived an earlier attack by humans, only to be killed by another group of humans who gleefully celebrated her death.
Discussion of nonhuman animal intelligence uses humans as the reference point, rather than looking at animal intelligence on its own. This is very common- we ignore the ways they're better and smarter than us unless we can use it as a thing to exploit, while focusing intentionally on the ways we see ourselves as superior. Many of our tests that do use us as a reference are very flawed. The spot test, for instance, assumes the animal cares if there's a spot there (something unrelated to intelligence.)
Better discussions climate change and depleted ecosystems due to hunting and exploitation of nonhuman animals by humans show up at the end. But, I still found the author to be too disconnected ethically from the whales he's writing about. Humans are emotional beings and pure objectivity is impossible. Thus the disregard for the desires and suffering of animals is usually self centeredness or even sadism (though I did not see the latter in this author's writing.)
I would recommend this book if you're really into paleontology or so into whales you can sit through it. Otherwise, skipping to the last third of the book might be best.