The story of a man s obsession with whales which takes him on a personal historical & biographical journey
- from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick & his excursions whale-watching. All his life Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales from the gigantic skeletons in London s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality
- they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents & antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In Leviathan Philip Hoare seeks to locate & identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write Moby-Dick ? After his book in 1851 no one saw whales in quite the same way again. This book is an investigation into what we know little about
- dark shadowy creatures who swim below the depths only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale it is also the story of our own obsessions.