RaveThe Guardian (UK)Gladwell has written a follow-up to his first work that revisits many of its themes. In its self-confidence, addictiveness and lucidity the new book resembles its predecessor, but bears the mark of an older, wizened author ... Many of Gladwell’s subjects are familiar and yet he injects them with a new energy ... For all Gladwell’s academic citations, his objective tone and his repeated references to lessons or laws, this is a book of songs, a skilfully woven fabric made of stories, images and metaphors. I devoured it, just as I did his first, though with more circumspection than my younger self, dwelling on its silences and omissions as much as its artistry.
Brad Fox
RaveThe Guardian (UK)A weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing, history and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown ... Fox spent years poring over Beebe’s notebooks, and he brings to life the explorer’s boyish curiosity, sensitivity and flaws.
Dacher Keltner
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)It is no easy task to reconcile scientific research with the messiness and ambiguity of the stories that we tell about ourselves and our emotions. The sciences and the humanities are sometimes compared to an estranged couple, and Keltner nobly seeks to address both parties ... Yet the two can never quite converse in this book. Presented in rapid succession, Keltner’s stories and cultural references can seem mere instruments to buttress his taxonomic system; rarely does he stay with his characters and explore how awe has played out in their lives ... It makes for an interesting, if disorientating, reading experience, and one that speaks to our own age.
Doreen Cunningham
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a striking, brave and often lyrical book that defies easy interpretation ... The experiences of the alienated pair are inseparable from their literary quarry, and as they travel up the Pacific coast, whale and human cultures seem to converge, eroding the gap between ourselves and our distant mammalian cousins ... Cunningham adroitly sidesteps much of the male-dominated narratives about whales and whaling, and clearly takes inspiration more from Inuit mythology than from Herman Melville. She and her son make for an unconventionally heroic pair, travelling by plane, train, bus and boat, and incurring disapproving looks and small humiliations in their quest to spot grey whales ... Her sensuous descriptions of grey whales and humpbacks provide some of the book’s richest passages; she looks at the whales and then looks at her son, looking at whales, which look back ... What could she hope to gain by taking her two-year-old on such a long journey, one that might catapult her further into debt and distance her from family? Early on this question is lodged in the writer’s and reader’s mind alike, and it simmers, tantalisingly, throughout the book. At times the narrator seems fixated on obtaining a transformative encounter with the whale, almost betraying a desire to jump the species barrier. Yet she is no Ahab; it is not a single whale to which she is drawn, but the collective, and in the end the whales act as stepping-stones, bridges to human relationships on her journey, notably with other women and mothers. What at first seems a reckless, near-mystical pursuit of an imagined being leads her to find a human pod of her own.
