This has been my least favorite Object Lesson so far. It just seems to fall apart toward the end with relevant but scattered information.

This is one of the less successful of the Object Lessons series, as it doesn’t seem to have a clear focus. Titled Whale Song, you would expect it to be about, well…Whale Song. And it is up to a point. But it also goes off message and rambles about, bringing in dolphins and gorillas and interspecies communication in general. Its exploration of why we are so fascinated by whales and whether or not we can communicate with them doesn’t seem to add anything new to the topic, but the examination of the environmental factors that seem to be disrupting cetacean communication is a timely warning on what humans are doing to our oceans. So good in parts, with some interesting snippets, but overall a bit unsatisfactory.

This is a short non-fiction book about whales, but also about whales’ relationship with humans.

I enjoyed this but not quite as much as I thought i would - I think I would have liked it to be more focused on whale facts rather than some of the deep thinking that went on about humans and whales. There were times I felt like the author went on a bit of a ramble about different things and also began talking about other animals and experiments that went on (that were interesting but just no specifically about whales aka Peter the dolphin).

I did actually, out of curiosity, put on a Spotify playlist of whale sounds while reading this and i think I may be converted now to a big whale sounds fan because it was so lovely, and relaxing!

This book was short(ish) but did managed to really put in a lot of different topics and discussions within the small book.

I have to begin by saying this is my first book in this series, but it certainly won't be the last.

Grebowicz frames her chapters by talking about whales and then delves into topics such as oceanic noise pollution, loneliness, music, and even Carl Sagan's golden record. All-in-all a satisfying read that will whet the readers appetite for more information on all the topics covered.

Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz is a short study of man's coexistence Grebowicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Goucher College, USA. She is the author of The National Park to Come (2015), Why Internet Porn Matters (2013), and Beyond the Cyborg (2013, with Helen Merrick). Her areas of expertise are 20th and 21st Century Continental philosophy, critical animal studies, environmental philosophy, gender, and sexuality.

Bloomsbury Publishing takes makes an interesting choice for this edition. Rather than a marine biologist as the author they chose a philosopher. This presents a unique perspective on the subject. She starts with contemporary man's awareness of sentient marines life. Any one old enough to remember the late 1960s and early 1970s remembers the "Save the Whales" campaign and The Song of the Humpback. The Song of the Humpback made it into mainstream culture and even primetime television. Suddenly, marine mammals and the oceans became popular. Jaques Cousteau had a television series exploring the oceans that ran for years.

Grebowicz takes a more modern look as well as the history of communicating with whales and dolphins. For a while, in the mid-1970s there was the talk that dolphins were as smart as humans. She also looks at Blackfish the story of the killer whale, who killed. Also discussed is a flash back to Carl Sagan and the gold plate on Voyager which included whale songs. The Voyager plate then takes the reader back to pop culture and Star Trek IV. The pop culture mentions are not important in themselves, but as a way of showing that the subject was on the minds of ordinary people.

Although communication takes up the lions share of the book, some information on whales in their environment is also given.  99% of earth's biosphere is ocean and 80% of the earth's biomass exists in the oceans. Most goods are transported by ship and the noise of the propellers has dramatically reduced the whales' communication range. The Navy's low-frequency communications equipment creates even larger problems.  In the past, man thought the oceans were too big to be destroyed or even damaged; We proved ourselves wrong.  

Whale Song is an interesting and unique look at our oceans and its intelligent mammals.  Grebowicz combines the present and the recent past and examines man's relationship with the ocean and, in particular, whales and dolphins.  A well-written book;  Informative and taken from an interesting perspective. 



Available September 7, 2014

Whale song, this book, attests, must be very important to us as a species – it garnered interest in a whole environmental movement when its plaintive sound was first recorded, and it even lives on in the form of data on the records stuck to the sides of the Voyager probes. It certainly has more import to us than just the fact hippies got off on what it might mean. It's a little unfortunate then that this summary of the science in defining, translating and parsing it in order to get inter-species communication is quite heavy on the science and the specialist term. And when it gets down to worrying if dolphins et al are skewed in their 'conversations' regarding us because we use technology, you hit the heights of the non-populist. Further chapters concerning the escapism we humans seek, and the deafness our modern world brings us, make us beasts in parallel with whales, which harks back to the hippyism, but replicates it much more competently than it ever showed itself. But ultimately we're far too often resident in Pseud's Corner here.

Whale Song is a slim volume that offers enormous reading pleasure. This book isn't so much a straight natural history about whale song or whales as it is a thoughtful and playful exploration about what human fascination with cetaceans reveals about humans.

The 1970 release of the LP Songs of the Humpback Whale signaled an attitudinal shift about the environment. Whales were no longer animals made to be hunted to line our corsets and fill our oil lanterns; they were now majestic creatures that, like us, vocalized, communicated, and felt deeply—or so their plaintive sounds suggested to us. However, as Grebowicz points out, "the antiwhaling movement and the subsequent growth of a culture of caring about whales was never just about the welfare of whales."

Our acknowledgment of cetacean intelligence certainly dovetailed with our Cold War–era imaginings about alien intelligence, and indeed Songs of the Humpback Whale was included in the space ship Voyager's Golden Record, the 1977 assemblage of human culture meant to explain ourselves to other intelligent life. Closer the present day, the viral social media phenomenon of 52 Blue, the whale vocalizing at frequencies beyond what any potential mates can hear, says more about our breakdown of community and intimacy, our own loneliness in the social media era, than it does about the actual whale's supposed inability to seduce a lady love.

We'd do well to consider other aspects of the context of our fascination with whales and dolphins, and more generally what our crazed consumption of cute animal videos via the emotional wasteland of social media says about us. Grebowicz reveals how the way we frame our research about cetaceans—our emphasis on and valuation of their curiosity and charisma—reflects our own impoverishment in these areas.

Grebowicz also has fascinating things to say about language versus communication, about historical attempts of interspecies communication (including the famous human Margaret Howe Lovatt and dolphin Peter cohabitation experiment), about music versus sound (I confess she lost me a bit here with the metaphysics), and about the dangers of conceiving our oceans as empty/blank space beyond the reach by human activity or agency. I love how she compared the physical pollution of the ocean, the toxic buildup that never goes away, to "language garbage" on the internet and the vast and unwieldy digital archives growing like a cancer as we speak (this review being no exception!).

I found this short but wide-ranging book deeply refreshing, thought provoking, and intellectually engaging. If this volume is any indication of the quality and content of the other volumes in the Object Lessons series, I'm very excited to read them. Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book. Be aware that material quoted here might differ in the final, finished copy of the book.