Leviathan, or the Whale

Leviathan, or the Whale
ISBN: 9780007230143
Publication Date: 1 December 2009

All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality - they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious.

In Leviathan, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write Moby-Dick? - after his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again.

This book is an investigation into what we know little about - dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale, it is also the stories of our own obsessions

**Author Biography:**Philip Hoare is the author of several books, including Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant; Noel Coward: A Biography; Oscar Wilde's Last Stand; Spike Island and England's Lost Eden. He lives in Hoxton, London, and Southampton, and each summer visits Cape Cod, where, as a member of the Center for Coastal Studies, he undertakes twice-daily expeditions to watch its whales.