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Saturday, July 4, 2009

Whale Tale wins BBC non-fiction prize


Whales, it seems, are the flavor of the month. A book named Leviathan has won the twenty-thousand-pound BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

No, not the acclaimed account of the history of whaling in America, also called Leviathan, written by Eric Jay Dolin, which has won the John Lyman Award and L. Byrne Waterman Award, both for excellence in American maritime history.

This particular prizewinner is Leviathan, Or The Whale, the story of a man's lifelong obsession with whales, by Philip Hoare. According to the BBC announcement, Hoare describes his travels about the world in pursuit of whales, an odyssey he compares to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Or The Whale. Which must account for the coincidence in titles.
And no wonder Greenpeace has ordered another ship.

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