Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author,Who Went in Search of Them [Hardcover]

Donovan Hohn (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 3, 2011

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year

A revelatory tale of science, adventure, and modern myth.

When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories.

Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable. With each new discovery, Hohn learns of another loose thread, and with each successive chase, he comes closer to understanding where his castaway quarry comes from and where it goes. In the grand tradition of Tony Horwitz and David Quammen, Moby-Duck is a compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Whimsical curiosity begets a quixotic odyssey and troubling revelations about plastics polluting the seas in former high school teacher and journalist Hohn's charming account of what he learned searching for 28,800 rubber bath toys lost at sea in 1992. His curiosity, prompted by a student's quirky essay, begins in 2005 around Sitka, Alaska, where yellow "duckies," frogs, turtles, and beavers washed up after three-story waves buffeted a container ship traveling from China to America. Hohn, a senior editor at Harper's magazine, eventually tracks more rogue ducks bobbing up from isolated Gore Point, Alaska, to Maine beaches. The author's quest leads him to a research vessel trawling for degraded plastic in Hawaiian seas, to the Chinese factory where the toys were manufactured, aboard a container vessel traversing the same route as the original ship (a particularly hair-raising section), and finally to the high Arctic to study the science of oceanic drift. Packed with seafaring lore and astute reporting, this enthralling narrative is the Moby Dick of drifting ducks. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Like Bill Bryson on hard science, or John McPhee with attitude, journalist Hohn travels from beaches to factories to the northern seas in pursuit of a treasure that mystifies as much as it provokes. His quest is to determine what happened to a load of 28,800 Chinese manufactured plastic animals in a container that fell off a ship en route to Seattle in 1992. Hohn’s inquiry leads him to 10 Little Rubber Ducks (2005), children’s author Eric Carle’s idealized board-book version, and also to the plastic-strewn beaches of an Alaskan island, a Hong Kong toy fair, and the Sesame Street origins of the rubber duck’s popularity. By turns thoughtful, bemused, or shocked, Hohn finds the story growing beyond his wildest visions as he learns about the science of ocean currents and drift and the lure of cheap plastic in a consumer culture that has dangerously lost its way. The resulting book is a thoroughly engaging environmental/travel title that crosses partisan divides with its solid research and apolitical nature. Rubber ducks as harmless, ubiquitous symbols of childhood? Not anymore, not by a long shot. This dazzles from start to finish. --Colleen Mondor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First American Edition edition (March 3, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780670022199
• ISBN-13: 978-0670022199
• ASIN: 0670022195
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #52 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Oceans & Seas > Oceanography

More About the Author

Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His journalism and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2, among other publications. Moby-Duck, his first book, was a national bestseller, the sole runner up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. A former English teacher, former senior editor of Harper's, and former features editor of GQ, Hohn is now a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 57 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended March 24, 2011

By Sean Dague

Format:Hardcover

A couple weeks ago I went to a lecture by the author of Moby Duck, Donovan Hohn. I was interested in this because of a story that I remember reading a few years ago. The story was about a flotilla of 1000 ghost rubber ducks, bleached by the sun, about to invade the coast of the UK.

That story turns out to have been false, part of the growing myth surrounding the Friendly Floatees. Much like the white whale, a figment of the collective imagination.

This book tells the story, as best can be reconstructed, of these toys. They weren't made of rubber, and the ducks only accounted for 1/4 of the toys (lost in the creating of the myths were the turtles, frogs, and beavers).

The story is incredible. In an attempt to find the full lifecycle of these toys Hohn goes up and down the Alaskan coast looking for the toys cast upon the rugged north Pacific beaches. He goes to sea, many times, including joining scientific expeditions looking at the plastic content of the Pacific, meso scale currents in the North Atlantic, and crossing the North West Passage (now possible due to a rise of 5 degrees C at the poles) all exploring the possible tracks these toys could have taken. He even goes to China to find the birth place of these toys, and crosses the Pacific on a container ship not unlike the one the Floatees fell off of.

His style is very much like that of Bill Bryson, though his mind drifts and wanders in a really interesting way that gives you a sense of the drifting and wandering of these toys at sea. It's an incredible lens to look at our Oceans, a largely unexplored part of our earth, the impact we are having on them, as well as the dangers that still lie out to sea.

Highly recommended.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars An Eclectic Tale, but Caught in Its Own Eddy in the End September 6, 2011

By H. Laack VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This was a fascinating summer read, providing details on shipping, on Alaska beachcombers, on the Woods Hole MA oceanography work, even on toy making in China and some fascinating Sesame Street trivia. In the end, however, I can't bring myself quite to go above three stars in the rating. The author's quest to track a wayward shipment of plastic bath toys was an interesting one but, when he reaches the point where it appears the East Coast sightings that started his journey were false, he doesn't quite know how to wrap things up. The last pages were not necessarily dull; they just don't really fit in this story. Better that he might have taken this portion of the account and spun it off as a long Atlantic or similar magazine piece.

I was a little surprised to see that there are high school teachers who are assigning this book. While it was an enjoyable read overall, it does seem like something to dip into a little bit, skimming here and there and getting more involved in other sections. Somehow, the thought of having to somehow read and report on this as a specific assignment would make the book more difficult to take too.

For those of us who enjoy reading a broad span of nonfiction, this is a good but not outstanding choice. Maybe make it a beach book, with the plan to skim through areas of less interest than others.

40 of 46 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A delightful, and far-ranging, read March 24, 2011

By Stephen Foster VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Donovan Hohn is new to me, and immediately joins the very small set of writers (John McPhee, Adam Nicholson, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian Frazier...) that merit an "automatic buy" of any non-fiction they write, literally even if the title be: "Toe-Jam."

[Update: I still haven't finished this book, having elevated it all the way to bathroom book, to prolong it longer: 20 minutes per day is a lovely dose. I'm realizing the author is more sly than he presents himself, but at this point I'm willing to forgive him anything.

But sly? At one point, a team he's with want to use ATVs to move several tons of collected plastic garbage across a wild, beautiful Alaskan isthmus so that it can be safely removed by boat. They're forbidden because archeologists complain that the ATVs might damage spruce trees that were "culturally-modified" by the ancient Unegkurmiut people. The team members rant on about how Spotted-Owl-ridiculous this all is, and make jokes about doing some "cultural modification" of trees using their chainsaws. Hohn opens the next paragraph discussing the Stockholm Syndrome, and how people tend to sympathize with the people they're with, but the rest of the paragraph is a description of the Unegkurmiut people, how utterly central the spruce trees were to their existence, and how future archeologists would curse the cleanup crew with the same breath used to curse Schliemann if their ATVs dragged garbage through the area. Sly.

Right now he's addressing his lifelong fear of water after watching "Jaws" at summer camp, and wondering if he has not somehow transmitted his fear into his young son by telepathy. At the same time he's also describing the run-in he's having with a certain recently-famous Alaskan governor, who vetoed funding for beach cleanup on State land because ... well, Alaska didn't PRODUCE the garbage, so it's not responsible for it...]

None of the other reviewers mention, but Hohn is also a genuine lover of words. Shortly after he boards a ferry for Alaska, we get: "I stand at the taffrail and think to myself 'taffrail,' enjoying the reunion of a thing and its word." That occurs on page 51, and I immediately relaxed into the book and literally put my feet up, secure that I was in the hands of a fellow-spirit.

Of course the story isn't about rubber duckies: the ducks are simply the fulcrum he places his lever on, the MacGuffin. He brings himself along as well: far better than dispassionate, invisible observer, he slips just a little of himself into the story, somewhat like John McPhee in The Control of Nature standing on a vibrating lava tube, looking down a hole onto the red flow itself, and admitting a fear-thrill a clear order of magnitude greater than any other in his life.

Hohn knows his science, but doesn't lord it over us; you get the sense of discovering things along with him. But perhaps the greatest joy of the book is how much a student of human nature he is. He's the sort of person who sits in a railway carriage and actually looks at the other people present, observes them, converses with them out of interest. I don't care who you are: you will learn plenty, reading this book.