The Fight to Save the Gray Whale

EYE OF THE WHALE: Epic Passage From Baja to Siberia, by DickRussell. Simon & Schuster, 688 pp., $35. OF ALL THE SLOGANS recent political movements have produced, “Save the Whales” may be the only one that actually sounds silly. Whales, after all, have gotten themselves the kind of attention most humans would envy, and other […]

Gray whales face new survival threats

Dick Russell, an environmental writer credited with leading a successful campaign two decades ago to save the Atlantic striped bass, has turned his attention to a considerably larger inhabitant of the ocean. The gray whale has caught his fancy, and Russell pays homage by retracing the 5,000-mile trip the animals make each year from the […]

‘Eye of the Whale’: The Jolly Gray Giant

It doesn’t have a sperm whale’s blunt charisma or impressive literary pedigree, but the undisputed media darling of the cetacean world is the gray whale. At first glance it might seem like an improbable celebrity, what with its Quasimodo-like hump, its massive drooping nose and its prickly crust of barnacles. But what the gray whale […]

Whaling, whaling, over the bounding main

Eye of the Whale: From Baja to Siberia with the World’s Largest Mammal By Dick Russell Simon & Schuster, 704 pages, $53.50 With Eye of the Whale, Dick Russell has filled a gaping hole in cetacean literature: a tome, nearly encyclopedic in its scale, which not only documents the life cycle of the grey whale, […]

Living Large

‘The Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia’ by Dick Russell THE EYE OF THE WHALE Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia By Dick Russell Simon & Schuster. 688 pp. $35 The evolution of even a powerful idea from sound bite to cliché to cultural dustbin doesn’t take long these days. “Save […]

Leviathans of the Deep

EYE OF THE WHALE Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia By Dick Russell Maps by Eben Given Simon & Schuster: 688 pp., $35 Just as Herman Melville is the hagiographer of the sperm whale, Charles Melville Scammon served that function for the gray whale. Although Melville was only a sometime whaleman (he sailed aboard the […]