The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North [Hardcover]

Jim Nollman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1578050871 | ISBN-13: 978-1578050871 | Publication Date: October 1, 2002 | Edition: 1

Animal communication expert Jim Nollman has sung with orcas, plucked a Jew's harp in waters teeming with humpback whales, and shaken rattles in the company of bottlenose dolphins. Now, in this heartfelt and quirky true adventure story, Nollman and two artist friends set out for Canada's vast Mackenzie Delta, electric guitar and underwater sound equipment in tow, to make music with belugas--the elusive white whales of the Arctic.
Traveling the expanses of this beautiful northern land, the three friends unwittingly find themselves at the center of a heated controversy over the Beaufort Sea belugas: Why have the whales stopped coming into the Mackenzie Delta, possibly jeopardizing their own calves, who live the first part of their lives in these shallow, warm waters? As they attempt to unravel the mystery, they encounter various intriguing characters now laying claim to the resources of the Mackenzie Delta region--Native people (who are allowed to hunt the whales), wildlife officials, and oil company engineers--all vividly described by Nollman. Along the way, he also conveys both the wonders and the realities of being deep in the wilderness--experiencing the connectedness of all living things while scratching the bites of the world's most fearsome mosquitos.
With its rich and passionate nature writing evoking lovely and remote landscapes, The Beluga Café suggests profound metaphors for our time about animal rights and animal intelligence, the role of science in conservation, the politics of extinction, and the place of art in the epic struggle to save the natural world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nollman, a nature writer and founder of Interspecies, a nonprofit organization that brings artists into animal habitats, writes of his latest adventure. Having already played music with whales and dolphins, Nollman and two friends prepare to go to the Arctic to see the beluga white whales. The trio becomes even more intrigued on learning that the whales seem to be leaving their native habitat. The book tracks the entire excursion from Nollman's efforts to get funds for the trip, believing that his desire to play underwater music is as deserving of a grant as other scientific methods. Along the way, the trio encounters harsh weather, unfriendly Native Americans and various illnesses. While such details are standard fare in accounts of explorations, Nollman's writing is far more original when he describes the setting and, of course, the whales. "The whale takes my breath away. It is eight feet long, composed of tightly overlapping driftwood chips bleached shiny silver from years of alternating sun and water. A bouquet of purple lousewort flowers forms the eye... From the whale's mouth issues a driftwood spiral as along as the whale's body, bound with features from a dozen or more bird species." The book will appeal most to animal-rights activists and readers wanting powerful descriptions of the Arctic wilderness.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

After 25 years of musical interaction with different species of animals, the author now specializes in making music with toothed whales. In a large canoe powered by an outboard motor, he sets out with two artist friends to spend the Arctic summer with belugas, the white "sea canaries" of the Arctic, who migrate to the shallow estuaries of the Mackenzie River delta in Canada to bear and nurture their calves. Nollman writes introspectively of the interactions among the three companions, their reactions to the Arctic landscape, and their encounters with local officials, Native people, and oil company employees. Though it is as much about human communication and response to the travails of travel in the Arctic as it is about playing music with whales, the book is woven throughout with a plea for the right of the belugas to live their lives unencumbered by fear of humans. This unusual mix of travel, nature, and philosophy transcends genres and will appeal to contemplative readers who appreciate the power of a well-turned phrase. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Sierra Club Books; 1 edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578050871
• ISBN-13: 978-1578050871
• Product Dimensions: 22.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,470,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who are we to say, July 5, 2005

By 

Patricia Kramer (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North (Hardcover)

This is a very powerful book. It is not the typical wilderness adventure book. Unlike the TV nature show, amazing things don't happen every few mintutes. In fact few amazing things happen at all, yet the whole experience of small wilderness experiences add up to a book that will take you to another place.

"It seems critical to me to devote some part of each year to this nothingness, this time without time, this confrontation with animal demons real and imagined, learning once again how to surrender to some internal environment made external."

Nollman confronts the question of us versus them strongly in this book with the us being modern society and them being animals, nature and native cultures. He feels the chance has been lost to learn from "them" in a way that everyone would benefit, instead of disregarding that knowledge and destroying it.

Chapter 15 begins with a wonderful quote by Carl Safina from Song for the Blue Ocean. "Ecosystems are now like history books with many of the pages ripped out. And when people come along there is no way for them to know what was on those torn-out pages. Their values are not constructed around the abundance that once filled those holes. They accept the blank parts as though they've always been there."

Nollman pulls no punches in what he experiences on this trip including describing the constant difficult and loving give and take among the three soujourners.

This is a strong book and well worth the time to read it.

2.0 out of 5 stars A well-intentioned effort but deeply disappointing, October 31, 2010

By 

Kieran Fox (Alam al-Mithal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North (Hardcover)

Let me say that I love whales and dolphins (I've been reading about them for years and in Fall 2009 I did an internship with a whale research center in Northeast Quebec) and I love the North (I spent summers working in both Alaska and the Yukon) so I thought I would greatly enjoy this book. Though Nollman has a keen eye for nature's beauty and an admirable candidness regarding his (often very petty) interactions with his two journey-mates, the book becomes a chore fairly quickly. What went wrong? My diagnosis: a lot of background and build-up, and no pay off. 200 pages in you start to get suspicious that they still haven't found any belugas or other whales, and then suddenly the book ends and you realize - nothing's happened. These three guys went up North, spent thousands of dollars, pissed off everyone in the area (the Natives think they're trying to mess with their ancestral rights to hunt the whales, which, ultimately, they are; park rangers think they are trying to secretly gather evidence that offshore oil-drilling explosions are hurting and killing whales which they would like to do, though that's not their purpose; etc.), bickered a great deal amongst themselves, and saw nothing. The overwhelming impression here is that Nollman already had a book deal signed for this journey before he went on it, and then he had to pony up even though he had little if anything to show for the trip. If I recall correctly, the only appearance that a beluga makes in this whole book is as a cube of blubber offered to the author's gang by some Inuit natives, who are later roundly condemned as needlessly slaughtering the few remaining whales in the area.

This is not a poorly written or executed work, but it just goes nowhere and we have nothing to focus on but the three protagonists themselves -- who mostly don't present themselves very well with their bickering and repeated childish tantrums. Finally, there aren't any belugas or other whales!!!

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful story, March 29, 2005

By 

David Anderson (Colorado) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North (Hardcover)

This is a quite wonderful story.... a music of words.... ebbing and flowing between near-surreal and ultra-surreal with only a few intrusions of pure didactic rationalism. Buy it and read it.