Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!!!

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.