Book review: Moby-Duck
Aug. 14th, 2011 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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jethrien's format...
Title: Moby-Duck
Author: Donovan Hohn
Genre: Non-fiction
Synopsis: In 1992, a container full of plastic bathtub toys was lost at sea. Years later, the plastic ducks, beavers, turtles, and frogs wash up on shores from Alaska to Seattle. One journalist makes it his epic quest to understand everything there is to know about this event.
Thoughts: This book is kind of a mess. Hohn is a very entertaining and informative writer, but the book I ended up reading was not at all the book I thought I would be reading. His two main flaws are that he is far more interested in examining why he finds the story of bathtoys lost at see intriguing than in telling us why bathtoys lost at sea is intriguing. And he is an English teacher, and cannot help make a large part of the book English papers on the various books he read during his research.
The book is about two hundred pages about ecology and the plague of plastic pollution, all of which will make you never want to use a plastic bag again. As he said, plastic pollution is by no means the worst ecological disaster facing the ocean (those would be global warming and increased acidity from our industrial and agricultural run off), but it is the most visible one, and the one that is absolutely and without question the fault of humans, as there are no natrual sources of plastic.
Then there are fifty pages on factory production of toys in China. Then fifty pages on the social construction of American middle class childhood. Then fifty pages on ocean currents. Then a hundred page travelogue about his journey on an Arctic ice breaker. Are you beginning to see the problem here?
- The book is assembled chronologically in the order of his research trips, rather than in any structure that makes sense to the story of the Floatees.
- The book is really rather long for what it is, and I can see evidence of a fight with the editor over this. Clearly at some point the editor told the author he needed to trim some of his ramblings. Which he did. Then included that stuff anyway, as footnotes. So the book is closer to 400 pages than 350, only some of those pages you have to flip to the back of the book and read in a smaller font. And he refers back to the excised sections in the remaining body of the text, so you really do have to read them to make sense of everything.
- The author became a father while working on this book. New fatherhood carries with it a burden of guilt and fear, and unfortunately in a person whose job requires them to travel extensively in areas with no cell reception, and to spend much of his time writing, that guilt permeates the book. There is quite a lot of navel gazing, wondering if the author is doing this selfishly and if he is a terrible father for pursuing this book. I swear to god, I'm not reading any more nonfiction from new parents, it's just too much.
That being said, throughout most of the book I was both entertained and educated, but it was all without an ultimate point or conclusion. The epilogue of the book is a freshman college English paper on the role of paternity in Moby-Dick. And, look, I get that he's an English teacher and a new father, but that had absolutely jack-all to do with the rest of the book, and it certainly didn't tie everything up, however decent it might be on its own merits.
So I'd have to say, if you are interested in the environment and ocean-going travelogues, this might be worth a look, but this pie didn't quite finish baking before it went to press.
Somewhat tangentially related to this, as I was reading his account of traveling on an ice breaker in the Arctic, I started looking up Arctic cruises. And you know the Northwest Passage? That countless people died trying to find? That the first people to transverse it did so by ramming their ship into the ice and waiting three years for the current to take them around the Arctic and spit them back out again? (That would be the Fram, and thy actually did the Northeast Passage, but still, first to transverse the Arctic.) You can take a cruise through that now.
Oh god I want to go. I think this just got added to my bucket list. When I have a month or two and a few thousand dollars to spare. I so want to go on an Arctic cruise! Even if it's not a complete transverse--even just to go to Baffin Bay and see where the icebergs live. And I say this as someone who gets terribly seasick and to whom Caribbean cruises have never appealed. Now that I've been to the Arctic, I really do want to go back. (You can take autumn cruises of the fjords in Greenland and see the Northern Lights! I want to gooooo! While there's still ice up there!)
jethrien's format...Title: Moby-Duck
Author: Donovan Hohn
Genre: Non-fiction
Synopsis: In 1992, a container full of plastic bathtub toys was lost at sea. Years later, the plastic ducks, beavers, turtles, and frogs wash up on shores from Alaska to Seattle. One journalist makes it his epic quest to understand everything there is to know about this event.
Thoughts: This book is kind of a mess. Hohn is a very entertaining and informative writer, but the book I ended up reading was not at all the book I thought I would be reading. His two main flaws are that he is far more interested in examining why he finds the story of bathtoys lost at see intriguing than in telling us why bathtoys lost at sea is intriguing. And he is an English teacher, and cannot help make a large part of the book English papers on the various books he read during his research.
The book is about two hundred pages about ecology and the plague of plastic pollution, all of which will make you never want to use a plastic bag again. As he said, plastic pollution is by no means the worst ecological disaster facing the ocean (those would be global warming and increased acidity from our industrial and agricultural run off), but it is the most visible one, and the one that is absolutely and without question the fault of humans, as there are no natrual sources of plastic.
Then there are fifty pages on factory production of toys in China. Then fifty pages on the social construction of American middle class childhood. Then fifty pages on ocean currents. Then a hundred page travelogue about his journey on an Arctic ice breaker. Are you beginning to see the problem here?
- The book is assembled chronologically in the order of his research trips, rather than in any structure that makes sense to the story of the Floatees.
- The book is really rather long for what it is, and I can see evidence of a fight with the editor over this. Clearly at some point the editor told the author he needed to trim some of his ramblings. Which he did. Then included that stuff anyway, as footnotes. So the book is closer to 400 pages than 350, only some of those pages you have to flip to the back of the book and read in a smaller font. And he refers back to the excised sections in the remaining body of the text, so you really do have to read them to make sense of everything.
- The author became a father while working on this book. New fatherhood carries with it a burden of guilt and fear, and unfortunately in a person whose job requires them to travel extensively in areas with no cell reception, and to spend much of his time writing, that guilt permeates the book. There is quite a lot of navel gazing, wondering if the author is doing this selfishly and if he is a terrible father for pursuing this book. I swear to god, I'm not reading any more nonfiction from new parents, it's just too much.
That being said, throughout most of the book I was both entertained and educated, but it was all without an ultimate point or conclusion. The epilogue of the book is a freshman college English paper on the role of paternity in Moby-Dick. And, look, I get that he's an English teacher and a new father, but that had absolutely jack-all to do with the rest of the book, and it certainly didn't tie everything up, however decent it might be on its own merits.
So I'd have to say, if you are interested in the environment and ocean-going travelogues, this might be worth a look, but this pie didn't quite finish baking before it went to press.
Somewhat tangentially related to this, as I was reading his account of traveling on an ice breaker in the Arctic, I started looking up Arctic cruises. And you know the Northwest Passage? That countless people died trying to find? That the first people to transverse it did so by ramming their ship into the ice and waiting three years for the current to take them around the Arctic and spit them back out again? (That would be the Fram, and thy actually did the Northeast Passage, but still, first to transverse the Arctic.) You can take a cruise through that now.
Oh god I want to go. I think this just got added to my bucket list. When I have a month or two and a few thousand dollars to spare. I so want to go on an Arctic cruise! Even if it's not a complete transverse--even just to go to Baffin Bay and see where the icebergs live. And I say this as someone who gets terribly seasick and to whom Caribbean cruises have never appealed. Now that I've been to the Arctic, I really do want to go back. (You can take autumn cruises of the fjords in Greenland and see the Northern Lights! I want to gooooo! While there's still ice up there!)