Something for the weekend -- Leviathan - The Book Depository blog

Perhaps I was always going to be a bit of a sucker for Philip Hoare's Samuel Johnson prize-shortlisted Leviathan. After all, one of my very favourite books is Moby-Dick, an obsession that Philip Hoare shares and which led him to write his astonishing book. If Hoare doesn't win the Johnson prize, believe me, I shall be very cross!

The story of a man's obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey -- from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and 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 and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In Leviathan, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and 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.