Customer Reviews

Sightings: The Gray Whales' Mysterious Journey

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This splendid book is aptly named, for the powerful glimpses in these chapters, full of emotion and drama, carry the resonance and significance of a sighting of the heart-shaped breath plume and knuckled back of one of the largest, gentlest, and most enigmatic creatures on the planet.
Sightings is beautiful reading. Each of the short chapters is rich as a poem, and indeed, many read like song or poetry, each woman's distinctive voice blending and harmonizing with her co-author's.
This book is not the standard National Geographic fare--though the authors are skilled reporters and intrepid travellers, following the whales in kayaks, small planes, boats and ferries. Theirs are the sightings of writers who don't merely observe, but who feel their subjects and feel them deeply, who use their intuitions and emotions as well as their intellects to come to their powerful conclusion: that, in this era of mass extinction, to kill such a creature as the gray whale is "an act against creation."
How lucky are we that these talented, spirited women have written this compelling and important testament to that truth.

SIGHTINGS is an incredible book to read on the plight of Gray Whales. Although I started reading SIGHTINGS the last day on a cruise ship in Cabos, (literally, moments after photographing a large pod of dolphins leaping out of the ship's wake)... my husband and I even skipped meals because I could not pull my head up from non-stop reading of this fine book. Linda Hogan's proses through a Native American's eyes were very beautiful and insightful... Brenda Peterson pucked my heartstrings with her naturalist perspective for this amazing mammal's plight and journeys through an OCEANPLANET, all the while a majority of humankind believes it owns it, yet refuses to accept responsibility for what befalls this watery world's consequence. I encourage all to read this book... its pages will open your eyes and one will not be dissappointed. Several years ago, I was one of many that wrote letters to the Mexican Government concerning St. Ignacia's breeding grounds of the great Gray Whale. The book finally told me of the outcome. When I am sailing on my boat named Rumbledoll in Neah Bay, WA this summer, or in Mexico next year, I will be searching for Gray Whales and their children... with a renewed hope of their perservation for many milleniums to come.

Jadia Ward/Bright Eyes Creations

I just finished this book today. If you are at all interested in whales, their history and their natural mystery than this book is for you.

I plan to go to San Ignacio Lagoon February 2011 on a Baja Expedition.

People in this book have done this expedition themselves and explain what they experienced. I can't wait!!!

I have read many books on whales over the course of my lifetime but I have never been so inspired by any book as much as I have from reading "Sightings". The book brings out the whales relationship with mankind. The qualities demonstrated by both are compassion and understanding and love. These qualities are perhaps the only qualities worth acquiring in life because they are the only qualities that not be destroyed by death. The murder of innocence or the rescue of it are the two sides of mankind that are brought out in these pages of events. This is a must read for those needing the courage to continue onward towards eventual reconciliation of intelligent souls.

This book, along with Serge Dedina's Saving the Gray Whale: People, Politics,and Conservation in Baja California, is required reading for anyone who plans a whale watching trip in Baja.