Voices in the Ocean (Casey)

Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins
Susan Casey, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385537308


Summary
A breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins.
 
Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seem like an aquatic mirror of mankind.

In recent decades, we have learned that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, grieve, adorn themselves, feel despondent, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, seduce, form cliques, throw tantrums, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don’t completely understand their incredibly sophisticated navigation and communication abilities, or their immensely complicated brains.

While swimming off the coast of Maui, Susan Casey was surrounded by a pod of spinner dolphins. It was a profoundly transporting experience, and it inspired her to embark on a two-year global adventure to explore the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship to humanity.

Casey examines the career of the controversial John Lilly, the pioneer of modern dolphin studies whose work eventually led him down some very strange paths. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment, travels to Ireland, where a dolphin named as “the world’s most loyal animal” has delighted tourists and locals for decades with his friendly antics, and consults with the world’s leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.

Yet there is a dark side to our relationship with dolphins. They are the stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry, whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured violently, then shipped and kept in brutal conditions. Casey’s investigation into this cruel underground takes her to the harrowing epicenter of the trade in the Solomon Islands, and to the Japanese town of Taiji, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, where she chronicles the annual slaughter and sale of dolphins in its narrow bay.

Casey ends her narrative on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document the great Minoan civilization, a culture which lived in harmony with dolphins, and whose example shows the way to a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.

No writer is better positioned to portray these magical creatures than Susan Casey, whose combination of personal reporting, intense scientific research, and evocative prose made The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth contemporary classics of writing about the sea. In Voices in the Ocean, she has written a thrilling book about the other intelligent life on the planet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Susan Casey is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (2005),
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean (2010), and Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins (2015).

In addition to authoring books, she served as creative director of Outside Magazine, where she was part of the editorial team that developed the stories behind the bestselling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, as well as the 2002 movie Blue Crush.

The Toronto-born Casey has been Editor-in-Chief of O, The Oprah Magazine since 2009. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] meticulously reported global odyssey.... Fans of Casey's writing know that she has an inexhastible curiosity and a knack for fully embracing her subject.... We're never quite sure where Casey's investigation will take us.... Casey isn't afraid.
Outside


Casey...embarks an investigation into the world of dolphins, impressing the reader with her curiosity and thrilling sense of discovery as she travels the world to learn about these unique creatures.... Casey’s book comes as a welcome addition on a topic also explored in the recent documentaries The Cove and Blackfish.
Publishers Weekly


This book does not provide scientific background as does Justin Gregg's Are Dolphins Really that Smart? but will interest general and YA readers, as well as nature lovers, who will lose their eagerness to visit dolphin shows and may be motivated toward further reading on the subject. —Judith B. Barnett, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Kingston
Library Journal


Casey takes the measure of the human-dolphin dance.... The most moving section of the book follows the author's visit to Crete...demonstrating their significance across ages. "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine," said astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. "It is stranger than we can imagine." That sublime wildness is exactly what Casey, ever the adventurer, reveals in this flawed but still entertaining book.
Kirkus Reviews

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