Customer Reviews

A Whale Hunt

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read this book completely ignoring the footnotes that continually compares the parallels to the book Mobey Dick. I was literally in the middle of some of the events leading up to and following the whale hunt, and to see someone capture it and write about it so visually was terrific. There are a few minor errors [Paul Parker was not a part of the crew, and Kleckoh means "Thankyou"], but overall Robert Sullivan conveys a people geographically isolated, rising above the family and tribal bickerings, protesters, personal battles and ocean to bring us a whale we waited more than 75 years for. Even knowing how the book ended I couldn't put it down until it was finished!

What a riveting story this book tells. It's about a tribe of American Indians in the Pacific Northwest who are trying to make a comeback against great odds, trying to reconnect with an ancestral tradition that none of them has witnessed, and doing so amid a swirl of eco-controversy. I got so wrapped up in the lives of the people the author depicts, and the breathtaking land- and seascapes in which the drama unfolds, that it was only after I finished the book that I paused to reflect what a virtuoso prose stylist Robert Sullivan is. He uses a variety of rhetorical approaches to bring out the full complexity of the situation he's describing. This book is both fun and profound, if that makes sense: wistful, weird, quintessentially American.

I couldn't put this book down. It is simply the most honest book I have read about a modern Indian community. I am a white woman and I have been married into a Northwest Native fishing family for fifteen years. Sullivan doesn't romanticize the Indian people in his story but he obviously respects them. He sees their shortcomings but he does not judge them. Sullivan understands that no outsider can ever really know what treaty rights mean to Native Americans. Yet Sullivan takes the reader to the reservation and allows us to experience these tribal people as they live through a profound moment in their history. Every detail in this book rang true, even the fact that Mr. Watson, an anti-whaling protest leader, would claim to be adopted by the Oglala. I have run into many white people who believe that they know more about traditional Indian spirituality than actual Indians. The Makahs in this story don't fit anyones preconcieved ideas of how Indian people should act, feel, speak or pray. This book is about a complex and ambiguous reality. Without preaching, it shows how much we still can learn from Indian communities. I bought a number of copies to give to my friends.

This is an interesting book, and Sullivan does his best to present pro-hunt and anti-hunt views objectively (though I agree his sympathies lie with the Makah, as mine did).

However, the book needed a stronger editor:

1. The book is a bit rambling, as if it were written largely verbatim from notes or a journal, and he couldn't bear not to use any of them; we just don't need to know the minutia like the fact that Sullivan put his daughter's car seat in the trunk in order to give two people a ride (his daughter, his car, the car seat, etc., play *no part* in the story's narrative - this is just filler).

2. In addition to the errors mentioned in Capt. Watson's review, there are numerous others (e.g., Navajos live largely in Arizona, not New Mexico). Someone trained as a journalist knows how to research facts and thus should be more careful with them; these errors make the reader doubt the veracity of Sullivan's account.

3. A few of the Moby Dick/Melville footnotes are interesting, but mostly they are annoying. As with distracting minutia, Sullivan seems to feel that he spent all that time reading Moby Dick and then Melville biographies, so he'd better put them in the book. He reaches so far to include Melville tidbits that it becomes quite comical: Sullivan mentions one of the crew is going bowling - BAM, footnote, Melville once worked at a bowling alley!!!; Sullivan went on an outing on April Fool's Day - BAM, footnote, Melville wondered if life was a joke!!! Sullivan feels these are cosmic coincidences joining the Makah whalers and the famous novelist of whaling. Unfortunately he undercuts this side story by seeing coincidences in things as common as breathing.

All that said, it's still not a bad book. It's just frustrating, because with some deft editing and reorganizing the book could have been outstanding.

This is one of those books that I do not quite know how to rate. The book is a first person account of a outsider observing the Makah Indian hunt for a gray whale off the Olympic peninsula in Northwestern Washington state.

The book is the greatest memoir I have ever read. The book gets a little wordy, but the writing is full of vivid details. I think the author provides thoughtful insight into the whale hunt through numerous conversations and interactions with local Makah Indians. I do agree with a previous reviewer that the author's viewpoint did seem slightly biased toward the Makah, but not enough to ruin the book. Some previous reviewers commented on the accuracy of the book. To be honest, I do not know enough about the topic to note whether the author's story is inaccurate or not.

I purchased the book as I wanted to find out more about the Makah whale hunt, as I did not realize the significance of the hunt to the Northwest Indians at the time it happened. Judging by the title of the book and the previous reviews, this did not seem like a bad choice. However, while the book is an excellent memoir, in the end it is a memoir of some journalist I have never heard of. I admire the author's dedication to the story as he followed it for well over a year while other reporters only seemed to appear when they though something will happen. In the end, I really did not care if the author slept in a tent or a plywood shack and I really did not find the type of car he rented to be especially relevant. While I am sure the trip to see the gray whales in the Baja Peninsula in Mexico was a moving experience, I really did not feel it fit into the overall storyline of the book. Also, I personally found the whole Moby Dick parallel to be incredibly irritating.

The book is an excellent read, though it does get wordy at times and some of the subjects do not seem to have much relevance to the storyline. The author had a lot of interaction with the Makah Indians who were on the whaling crew. For this reason, I would recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the Makah gray whale hunt. I would also recommend the book for anyone who is interested in the modern life of Northwest coastal Indians or who are bored and just looking for some decent non-fiction to read.

Despite a bad cold and a fever and the World Series, I couldn't stop reading A Whale Hunt. Like the books I enjoy most, I found this work to be a great adventure, which I was luckily enough to be a part of. And though it is a beautifully researched piece, the book was fun and touching and didn't treat the entire event as some somber anthropology lesson with the noble savages. I greatly look forward to Robert Sullivan's next book.

The hunt is over 6 years in the past, and has not been repeated. This gives lie to the accusations that the Makah were puppets in the hands of Japanese and other commercial interests. Some people have trouble believing that indigenous peoples can act on their own volition.

While I would much rather live in a world in which no animals were killed for food, I have to ask, why pick on the Makah? Greenlanders and native peoples of Chukotka hunt whales, so why can't the Makah? If the hunt could rally the tribe, how strongly can I protest the deaths of five whales, while millions of pigs, chickens, cows, and ducks are being slaughtered?

Here in Taiwan, boar are a protected species, but the tribesmen in my village feel that they have an ancestral right to poach boar. Hunting boar is something others can't do; they don't know the mountains, they don't have the skills, and anyway, you want to go stick a knife in an angry boar? I have noticed that the successful hunters stand tall, hold their heads high in front of their families, and drink less. It would be nice if prestige and self-respect among Tayal were based on poetry or juggling, but they're not, and I feel no drive to remake their society to conform to my wishes. Every day around the world, millions of bound animals are slaughtered ruthlessly for consumers; if a tribesman wants to give a wild animal a fair fight with strength, skill, cunning, and courage, I do not need to force him to act according to my will.
(I have been a vegetarian for over 20 years, have never gotten a driver's license or purchased an air conditioner, plant trees whenever I take a jet flight, and feel that my environmentalist credentials are valid.)

What we need is a balanced discussion. With changes in the oceans' ecosystems, large numbers of gray whales are dying naturally; of course there is a difference between natural death and murder, but who cares about them, or protests the shrimp fleets that devastate the oceans? When the anti-whaling forces make death threats and post DAMN THE MAKAH FOREVER on their websites, we are not talking about reasonable discourse. The missionaries are peeved that the heathen savages have not toed the line.

Although the author ridiculed the protestors, he didn't give us a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of the hunt, or even go into much depth about how the hunt would benefit the Makah, beyond vague generalities: it'll benefit them. They're spiritual. It's their right.

Sullivan didn't give me a good sense of the Makah: how do they differ from Joe Blow, the average non-Indian American outdoorsman in a small town?

Mr Sullivan desperately needs a Remedial Composition course. He seems to labor under the idea that if you repeat the same sentence pattern enough times, it becomes beautiful. He loves run on sentences. His usage is poor. In Chapter 10, he says the harpoon "is comprised of two lengths of yew." No sir. It is composed of two lengths of yew. Rustle has two meanings that I know of: to make a soft sound, as the rustling of leaves, or to steal, as in rustling cattle. What am I to make of this sentence? "His dark shoulder-length hair rustled in the breeze "(chapter 34).

His grammar needs work too. The note on page 203 says there are two brothers, and one is the oldest. No, he is the older, because there are only two. That's something he should have learned in grade school!

In his description of German author May, for some reason he starts giving us both the original German quote and the English translation. From time to time he presents a Makah word in IPA transcription, at other times just sounds it out.

Where was the editor? The book is full of irrelevant details, especially about Moby Dick. The only real connection between Moby Dick and the Makah is hunting whales, but Sullivan beats it to death. Sea Shepherd Paul Watson claims membership with the Oglala Sioux - a claim an earlier reviewer refutes in detail - and Sullivan has to tell us that Melville's cousin fought Indians. Does it matter? Half way through the book, I started skipping the footnotes, because they contribute nothing.

The book is far too long. Sullivan can't let go of any trivial bit of research. He tells us what tv show somebody was watching, what brand of soft drink somebody drank. Why on earth does Sullivan think we want to know cousin John sleeps on a queen size bed? In the middle of the climatic whale hunt, the author digresses to explain in some detail how somebody's cell phone is billed. Does he suffer from attention deficit? Is he getting paid by the word?

Eventually, I realized that Sullivan is actually a genius. He drags in Melville and a thousand inconsequential details for a very good reason. By about Chapter 60, the reader says, "Enough already! Just go harpoon the darned whale and get this over with, ok?"

No less an authority than the New York Review of Books assures me that the book is `funny.' A book of this sort need not be funny, but if it is, so much the better, and indeed I did laugh a few times. However, the overall tenor of the book is hardly funny, although I did spot a few places where Sullivan appears to be attempting humor. For a one-word description, tedious would fit better than funny.

If you want to know how poorly Sullivan served the Makah, read The Reindeer People. See how this sort of book >should< be done.

This is an interesting book, and Sullivan does his best to present pro-hunt and anti-hunt views objectively (though I agree his sympathies lie with the Makah, as mine did).

However, the book needed a stronger editor:

1. The book is a bit rambling, as if it were written largely verbatim from notes or a journal, and he couldn't bear not to use any of them; we just don't need to know the minutia like the fact that Sullivan put his daughter's car seat in the trunk in order to give two people a ride (his daughter, his car, the car seat, etc., play *no part* in the story's narrative - this is just filler).

2. In addition to the errors mentioned in Capt. Watson's review, there are numerous others (e.g., Navajos live largely in Arizona, not New Mexico). Someone trained as a journalist knows how to research facts and thus should be more careful with them; these errors make the reader doubt the veracity of Sullivan's account.

3. A few of the Moby Dick/Melville footnotes are interesting, but mostly they are annoying. As with distracting minutia, Sullivan seems to feel that he spent all that time reading Moby Dick and then Melville biographies, so he'd better put them in the book. He reaches so far to include Melville tidbits that it becomes quite comical: Sullivan mentions one of the crew is going bowling - BAM, footnote, Melville once worked at a bowling alley!!!; Sullivan went on an outing on April Fool's Day - BAM, footnote, Melville wondered if life was a joke!!! Sullivan feels these are cosmic coincidences joining the Makah whalers and the famous novelist of whaling. Unfortunately he undercuts this side story by seeing coincidences in things as common as breathing.

All that said, it's still not a bad book. It's just frustrating, because with some deft editing and reorganizing the book could have been outstanding.

Having lived in Washington and seriously followed the Makah Tribe and their trials and tribulations, I was facinated by Mr. Sullivan's insight. He is right on and extremely vivid in his descriptions and insights. I found myself taking the trips with him and totally enjoying every minute of his journey.

I do not know the Makah. I have never lived with them or been along on their hunt so I can not comment on the veracity of that portion of this book. It seems true but then I found such a totally sloppy bit of "research" on the part of the author that it puts the entire book in doubt for me.
The author accepts Paul Watson the racist "captain" of Sea Shepherd on his word when each of his various stories could have been so easily checked out and found to be what they are - lies. In 1973 I was the first Medic into Wounded Knee. I created the clinic and became the chief Medic. Watson claims to have been a Medic at the Knee and to have done many brave and heroic acts. He claims to have had a vision in the Inipi (Sweat Lodge) and to have been given a name by the Wicasa Wakan (medicine men) Crowdog and Black Elk. He bases his credential for opposing the Makah on this vision. Mr. Sullivan believes him. Mr. Sullivan gets an "F" for not doing his homework.
Watson was not a medic at Wounded Knee '73. On several occasions I have personally posed some basic questions about the clinic to Watson, he could not answer any of them. From his lack of knowledge about the layout of the village as it was during the siege and the fact that not one WK'73 veteran can remember him (Last time we had a get together I asked about it in a group of over one hundred WK'73 Vets!) I doubt thay he was there at all. Crowdog and Black Elk both say they do not know him. Both Wicasa Wakan say they did not conduct naming ceremony for him. Both deny any such "vision" occuring or that they interprettted any vision. Rocky Madrid doesn't know him even though Watson claims to have saved his life under fire.
The list goes on and each bit is easily researched. Mr. Sullivan did not bother doing research, instead he relied on Watson's word. Very very sloppy.

Having lived on reservations I will say tha the parts about the Makah ring true, but, knowing this much of the book to be fiction put the whole book into doubt for me.