Saturday, July 04, 2009

A Whale of a Winner


This year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction has gone to a book about whales, Philip Hoare's Leviathan which has been described as :
... part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale.
Hoare apparently fell in love with whales after reading Moby Dick and first encountered the mammal when he saw a killer whale at Windsor safari park.

The chairman of judges, Jacob Weisberg, said of the book :
The quality of his writing was just so impressive, it is literary, just beautiful. It is a model of a certain kind of writing and I imagine it is a book that will be read for a long time to come.
You can listen to Hoare talking about his book to Claire Amistead here and find an extract here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The book looks VERY good. I want! But at 60 quid!!!! Ugh!

:-)

- Poppadumdum

bibliobibuli said...

wait for the paperback lah. now it's a winner it's bound to get republished and paperbacked ...

Anonymous said...

It's apparently richly illustrated so the hardback would be nicer but yeah, I'll wait for the paperback. Always loved whales.

- Poppadumdum

umapagan said...

Oh my God. There's some great news. I picked this fella up last November. Wasn't able to put it down. You need to get it Sharon. It's reads magnificently!