Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales shed light on the condition of our seas. Fathoms: The World in the Whale blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? Will our connection to these storied animals be transformed by technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendour, and fragility of life? In Fathoms, we learn about whales so rare they have never been named, whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet’s atmosphere. We travel to Japan to board the ships that hunt whales and delve into the deepest seas to discover the plastic pollution now pervading the whale’s undersea environment.

In the spirit of Rachel Carson and Rebecca Solnit, Giggs gives us a vivid exploration of the natural world even as she addresses what it means to write about nature at a time of environmental crisis.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Animals, Environment, Audiobook, History

352 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2020

About the author

Rebecca writes about how people feel toward animals in a time of ecological crisis and technological change.

Her debut nonfiction book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, is out in 2020 with Simon & Schuster (US), and Scribe (Aus/UK).

Rebecca's essays and articles have appeared in Best Australian Science Writing and Best Australian Essays, as well as in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and Griffith Review. Her topics span jellyfish swarms, how sea-turtles fare in heatwaves, the history of leeches as weather prediction devices, and whether cows have friends.

The unceded, sovereign lands Rebecca principally writes on, in Australia, are within the Whadjuk region of Noongar country — land that is, and always was, Aboriginal.

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich, vibrant and thought provoking. Capturing the intricate and fragile ecosystems surrounding the biggest animals on earth in an intelligent and associative manner
We had a picture of earth from space before we had a picture of a whale swimming underwater

Fathoms: The World in the Whale is an incredibly informative book about whales 🐋
Rebecca Giggs starts her story from her observations of a stranded whale, but ranges far and wide in this book. I for instance never knew it costs AUD 188.000 clearing up a whale that is stranded. Or that a whale was found with not only a matras but also a whole greenhouse that was washed into the ocean, in its stomach.

These costs are due to the fact that killer whales are for instance the most contaminated animals, with blubber accruing heavy metals and toxins. During the lifetime of the whale the blubber does not interact with the metabolism as long as the animal is not drawing on its reserves during migration. But through the placenta and milk the toxins are transferred to calfs. PCB’s being banned in the rich countries in the seventies still having ramifications on killer whale populations nowadays, confining them to the arctic regions.
From this point on the main narrative of the book, how whales and humans interact, comes more and more into focus. For instance Inuit women not being able to breastfeed due to whale meat consumption, with toxin level comparable to gold mine workers in China.

Another topic of interest is how many species depend on whales, with up to 200 species feeding from a whalefall, a phenomenon only seen for the first time by a human in a submarine in 1977.
Basque being the basis of modern whaling in the 16th century, with the Dutch, Danish and British following soon the profits, whaling being the 5th industry of the USA in the 19th century. Like cows, whales were used for everything, from oil for lighting and greasing artillery to the first hoolahoop being from whale baleins. People “bathing” in dead, steaming whales in Australia against rheumatism and psychological problems, a dip in a whale being similar to a Turkish bad
The oil industry advent versus whaling is interesting, from one side reducing demand while increasing the scope of humans to find and kill whales in the still pristine arctic on the other hand. More than 3 million whales have been killed during the 20th century.
Sperm whale oil being used by General Motors till 1973, while more regular whale oil was used for lipstick, margarine and glove colouring even after the Second World War.

I find it hard to amalgamate the different facts Giggs offers to the reader in a fully smooth narrative. My recommendation would be to just read the book, if you are in any way interested in whales, ecosystems and capitalism vs ecology. This is a book that makes you think hard about our species impact on the world, in the tradition of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History of Elizabeth Kolbert. Highly recommended!

More fascinating factoids:
Whales being worth 1.000 trees in carbon capture due to their moving nutrients up in the sea and transforming this into plankton (via their poop). 90% of climate warming occurring in the oceans and changing the migratory patterns of whales, and CO2 accruing most in Arctic seas, possibly making it impossible for krill to spawn.
Ecological collapse and interconnectedness of ecosystems, with microscopic krill potentially and ironically impacting the largest animals in the world.
Ecotourism versus news like: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/an...

A killer whale in captivity in Japan eating the equivalent of a washing machine in rocks from the soil of its enclosure, potentially as a kind of suicide attempt to escape its conditions.
A life size photo of a whale being printed weighing 400 pounds, and all whales see in monochrome as they have hardly any cones in their eyes.

Noise pollution in sealanes cutting up the living area and migratory routes of whales, with 1/3 of Mediterean whale stranding being due to naval exercises involving sonar.
Humpbacks singing less loud than in the past, and threatened by Chinese navy encrypting information in broadcasts to evade.
Cultural whale revolutions occurring periodically, leading to humpback songs becoming less complex in a kind of reset, before growing more intricate again.

Till 1973 whale meat was available in Macy’s. At the same time as the USSR was feeding whale meat to fur farms.
Whales brings up 85.000 dollar in South-Korea.
Even in Japan only 11% of household buys whale meat yearly, per person consumption being around the same as a few slices of ham.

Narwhal and Beluga interbreeding with the climate change induced breakdown of polar ice borders between living areas.
Seagulls attacking whale calfs in Argentina due to neural damage done to the birds from overuse of fertilizers as poured out into the ocean
Birds having almost 8% of their weight being plastic.

Whales carrying and supporting whole ecosystems, including whale lice, remora and a worm of over 26 feet long nestled in the uterus of sperm whale.
Parasite as an evolutionary booster to help the development of the host.
Whales that can reach an age of 211 years, and carry around stone and ivory harpoon tips.

[Spencer H · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at like 20%. I have never been so misled about a book by goodreads. Was I reading the same book as the other reviewers?? I thought this book started promisingly enough and I was really looking forward to the content. Who doesn't love whales? And all this horrifying stuff about them swallowing garbage - bring on the facts! Except wait, no, instead I was then treated to page after page of the most ridiculous writing I have ever encountered in a non-fiction book.

It was like the author went through with a thesaurus changing every sentence to include as many awkward, arcane words as possible until her meaning was nearly obscured to be, like, DEEP and all. Sometimes the words weren't even used right! "...to a time when the landmass known as Australia was not superimposed under that name..." Um, superimposed means to be over a thing... so you can't be superimposed UNDER something. Did she mean "before that name was superimposed on the continent"?? Even that would be a strange way of communicating your point.

"Whales, I saw, can magnify the better urgings of our nature". Better urgings? Talk about awkward phrasing. Skip to literally any page in this book and it's RIDDLED with these sorts of weird sentences. Here's another gem: "Subsistence whale hunting relied on the supply of surrounding environments, as the componentry of archaic whaling weapons attests". Componentry?! Seriously?!

I tried to keep going, and honestly am super impressed I managed to read this for almost two hours before finally giving up. What a wonderful topic (and clearly lots of research) ruined by a need to sound as ?pretentious as possible. I can't believe there are so many reviews here praising the writing. Good science writing moves you because it is simple, concise, and compelling. This book (at least for the first 1/4) is a hodgepodge of rambling that reminds me of overhearing some drunk grad students at a bar.

I hate writing bad reviews because books are always labours of love and this one certainly seems to have been very personal for the author. But I also believe there is just no excuse for shoddy writing when there are so many amazingly talented authors out there who can't get published. I am going to move on to a different non-fic book to try and get this bad taste out of my mouth...

[Tom LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found out about FATHOMS by browsing at a Barnes & Noble. I was captured, of course, by its gorgeous cover, but also by the description in the front flap. It was a bit of a gamble but I like to live my life on the edge.

The book is absolutely spectacular, and the only person who’s happy I’ve finished it is my wife, who’s had enough of hearing me blurt out “woah”, followed by a whale-related fact that she absolutely didn’t ask for.

Giggs manages to write about nature in a way that engages both the scientific and the literary dimensions, the left and the right brain hemispheres, with a deep respect for both.

By the section called “Whalefall” I was mesmerized.

Since it’s not a term that most of us use everyday, what is this “whalefall”?

In brief, it’s what happens when a whale dies in the ocean and is not washed into the shallows. For weeks, or even more than a month, it will float on the surface, pecked at by seabirds, fish, etc. Then it slowly goes down.

“ Then, sometimes, the entire whale skeleton will suddenly burst through the cloud of its carcass. For a time, the skeleton might stay hitched to its parachute of muscle; a macabre marionette, jinking at the spine in the slight currents. Later, it drops, falling quickly to the seafloor, into the plush cemetery of the worms. ”

It’s like reading DeLillo, only this is a non-fiction book!

Giggs talks about the many ways in which humans have polluted the oceans to the extent that it’s already coming back to us big time (via toxins found in fish or even microplastics and all sorts of unhealthy stuff), and she gives a shocking (at least to me) but very well-researched overview of the nefarious impact of human activity on whales, even beyond whale hunting.

However, never once she talks about environmental or conservation topics without losing the elegance and the delicate lyricism that pervades the book. She never comes across as an aggressive Greenpeace activist, or a “how daaarre you” green-party warrior. She lays out the facts - and, sometimes, the horrors - of what our economy has done to the global whales population, always with the careful intelligence of a scientist and, at the same time, with the love of metaphor and of unusual connections of a poet.

The subtitle “the world in the whale” comes from the realization that whales can actually “contain” the world. One whale was found with an entire greenhouse in its stomach - plant pots, hose pipes, glass, the whole lot. Like Giggs says: “ We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world. ”

Did you know that:

- in the 19th century people were almost constantly in contact with whale-gleaned products, in much the same way as most people today are never far from plastic objects.

- by the end of the 1960’s, the whaling industry had almost killed all the whales in the southern hemisphere. ‘70s activism was successful in stopping that massacre, and a trans-national effort made whaling illegal with a global moratorium in 1982, with some exceptions, like Iceland, Norway, Japan and Russia (that still allow whaling within some limits).

- the circulation of plankton accounts for the absorption and displacement of about half the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. Whalefalls bring about two tonnes of carbon each to the bottom of the sea - carbon that would otherwise take 2.000 years to accrue on the sea floor. The removal of so much whale mass from the oceans during the 20th century, therefore, had an indirect effect on the composition of our atmosphere. Researchers have projected that increased numbers of whales can help offset a measurable quantity of emissions.

- humpbacks feed their young on pink milk, due to their diet of rosy krill.

- on some islands off Australia the bodyweight of some birds is 10 percent plastic.

- worldwide, there are 5 plastic gyres in the seas that stretch for miles, swirling with the refuse of modern lives.


If there is one main thing I’m taking away from this book is that, from whales changing the air quality, to inuit women finding toxins from fish in their breasts, to wild belugas contracting a disease from house cats, in our world EVERYTHING is deeply interconnected, much more than what we assume or can even imagine.

“ We are all tumbled together, human and nonhuman, the far and the nearby, deeply in torsion, inhabiting this change of state. .”

Fathoms is a real gem.

[8stitches 9lives · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fathoms is award-winning Australian writer Rebecca Giggs’s narrative nonfiction debut and is quite unlike anything I've ever read before. Whilst it may appear to be all about whales and their habitat this book actually encompasses an array of topics from the natural world and the beauty and destructive power wrought by mother nature right through to philosophy and climate change, all of which are written about in expressive and dazzling prose. The sections addressing the topic of extinction of a variety of animals, including ourselves, I found moving as it is clear to see the authors profound love for the natural world and her increasing anxiety with the way humans refuse to curtail their activities or effect changes to protect our planet and all of its precious gifts. All of this makes for a beautiful reading experience, and I feel all of those who appreciate the wonders of our world will thoroughly enjoy it. It is a refreshing and compelling amalgamation of knowledge and memoir and covers a great deal of ground without ever feeling too sprawling to grasp. Many thanks to Scribe for an ARC.

[Annika Hipple · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love whales, so I really wanted to love this book, but I ended up giving up on it after about 100 pages. On the surface, it seemed like it would be fascinating, and the bit I read did contain plenty of interesting information, but I just couldn't take the author's writing style. She constantly uses words and metaphors wrong, in ways that, even with poetic license, make no sense. Apparently many readers have found the writing lyrical and beautiful. I found it bizarrely convoluted and at times nonsensical. I hate not finishing a book, especially when the subject matter really interests me, but in the end this one wasn't worth the frustration.

Another reader posted a link to this review in a comment elsewhere: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/revie... It sums up a lot of my thoughts about this book.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a fascinating read in parts and I learned quite a bit. But there where something that kept me from loving it. I'm not sure I was found over the writing style even though the subject was very interesting

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

[FATHOM] 1. Anachronism: a six-foot quantification of depth or breadth, originally indexed to a fingertip-to-fingertip measurement (or “arm-span”) and accounting for spools of cordage, cables, cloth, or other materials; commonly used to demarcate the extent of a water column; 2. An attempt to understand: a metaphor for reaching out to make sense of the unknown.

I learned about the sorts of whales we never see and why that might be so: I learned of the whale that has no name, the whale with two voices, whales with two pupils in each eye, and whales puppeted by storms on the sun. I discovered that whales have been the subjects of cuisines and conspiracies, that they have housed monsters and do still. I learned that we change the sounds of whales even where we do not make a noise, that humpbacks have pop songs, and that beluga have tried to speak human tongues. I learned about whale vision, bisonar, and memory: human grief, human love, and interspecies recognition. I set out to draw a few lines between myself, the stories I knew about whales, and the science of our changing seas. By the time I came to the end, I understood that these connections were far from esoteric concerns. Whales, I saw, can magnify the better urgings of our nature and renew those parts of us that are drawn, by wonder, to revise our place and our power in the natural world.

As author Rebecca Giggs tells it, seeing a juvenile humpback whale beached near her Sydney, Australia home — and waiting around with a crowd of others, helpless, as the massive creature died over the course of several days — caused her to question the mystery behind such beachings of seemingly healthy animals. And as she researched that question, Giggs was drawn further into the magnificence of whales, the history of their relationship with humans, the near extinction and incredible recovery of several species, and the more serious challenges they face today, even as most of the world has banned whale-hunting; Fathoms:The World in the Whale is the result of her whale-related research, memories, and travels. Written as equal parts memoir and science book, Giggs’ own thoughts and feelings about what she learns are always at the forefront — which, looking at others’ reviews, can be off-putting to those just looking for the science — and I appreciated everything that she shared in this book, even if some of the writing went over-the-top.

Fathoms is filled with fascinating information about our relationship with whales; from the Stone Age to the Space Age, they have literally loomed larger than life in our conscioussness. A smattering of facts:

• The clinks made by sperm whales last mere microseconds but are among the loudest single-source noises on Earth — louder than a Saturn V rocket — and can be heard over a distance of 1600 miles (from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland).

• Parts of whales used by humans have ranged from the baleen used in corsets and discipline sticks (from where the term “whaling on someone” comes) to the spermaceti (a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales) that lubricated both the looms of the Industrial Revolution and mechanisms inside ICBMs during the Cold War.

• A natural carbon sink, when a large (forty ton) whale dies at sea, two tons of carbon will eventually settle on the seafloor (an amount that would otherwise take two thousand years to accrue).

As for the over-the-top writing: Giggs often waxes poetical (there is more alliteration in the prose than could be accidental; each dusky sky is “empurpled”; our existence “embiggened” by the existence of whales) and she uses arcane vocabulary that sometimes enchanted me (the use of “ensorcelled”) but often rankled (“apotropaic” or “telluric”). My overall reading experience was positive, but passages like the following would stop me as I wondered if I liked them or not:

What environment was ever more shielded from our collective imagination than the underside of the sea surrounding Antarctica? Unlit omnisphere, far-fetched. White noise; ice shifting, krill krilling. Trundled by see-through salps, orbital sponges, and other questionably animate organisms, the seabed shilly-shallies into murk, lacking all tactility and aspect. No writer, in good conscience, could reach for a word like “terrain” to detail it. A void. The Southern Ocean is galactically dark. A mirror for the Vantablack of the cosmos.

Questions of style aside, Giggs had much to teach me about the pressures that modern-day whales face: their numbers may be rebounding in the decades since the (nearly) global moratorium on their hunting was put into place, but new threats come from the supercarriers that transport our goods over the oceans that disrupt migration pathways (I did not know that the fifteen largest ships annually emit as much carbon as all of the cars on the planet); the sonic air guns that are used for seismic mapping of the ocean floor to find oil deposits disrupt underwater whale calls, affecting mating and the sonar-location of prey; the warming and acidification of the oceans are melting the ice caps and impacting the various species at the base of the food chain; but maybe most impactfully, beached whales are being discovered with their bellies filled with our plastic goods, from countless shopping bags and nylon fishing nets to one whale that had swallowed an entire greenhouse. A ban on single use plastics might make us feel like we’re fixing the world, but I don’t know how to defend whales against swallowing something as large as a greenhouse when it gets blown out to sea from an Almerían hydroponics farm.

Though we may believe in the reality of being materially connected to many, many far-off things, it is only when we hear of these connections breaking, we can confirm that it’s true. Which might be the ultimate value of all these stories: to underline how large our lives are, when they can sometimes feel small and short, slotted into ever narrower silos and categories. The sea is not eternal and unchanging as once we imagined. But neither are we condemned to be changeless. After all, to say that our impacts are global coaxes us toward seeing that our powers to affect positive change are too.

Ultimately, I was charmed by this book because I was happy to learn what Giggs had learned, presented through the lens of her experience; otherwise, I could have just spent the afternoon Googling “whales”. The writing may have tipped towards excess at times, but that, too, was a part of the experience of one human being reaching out with enthusiasm and another — me — willing to be reached. Much to recommend in this; more effort is needed to save the whales.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishingly beautiful book about whales, humanity, wildness, ecology - everything basically. Giggs writes gorgeous, poetic prose and packs a miraculous amount into 320 pages. The introductory essay may be the best piece of writing I've read all year.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

We live in their wake as they live in ours.

This follows my reading about birds and fungi, so I suppose I have checked off Air, Land and Sea. The first two books were definitely about birds and definitely about fungi. This one was about whales, yes, but more so about the world around whales, and us.

The author begins with a beached whale. Now, this is something I have found enormously interesting. Not the stranding of a single whale, but the occurrences, and there are many, of mass beachings. There were times, reading this, where I thought this might be the point of the book because the author takes her time going through the usual suspect causes: fertilizer run-off, plastic grocery bags and other non-perishables that whales eat (like a whole greenhouse), climate change, sonar, solar storms, and maternal and group instincts. But, I realized, she makes no ultimate conclusions, and was just repeating various theories. No one really knows.

There were things here I mildly disagreed with. The author wrote: But what concept does a shark have of a tree? A jellyfish can't think of a leaf; or if a jellyfish does, it has no word to describe it. We alone have concepts of the past. Yet my readings of birds and mushrooms suggest that other species have a kind of "intelligence" and a kind of "memory."

Then, at other times, she would get me nodding. Like "the windshield phenomenon." Remember back forty, fifty years ago? You'd go out for a drive and after awhile you'd have to stop and wash the bugs from your windshield. Where have all the bugs gone? she asks. Like the author, I am as anti-pesticide as it is possible to be.

Also like the author, I hate zoos. I know that makes me an outlier, and I know that children LOVE zoos. But I look at a lion, in an enclosed area, knowing it was trapped, captured, shipped; no longer to run and chase down an antelope. Giraffes, rhinos, macaques. But maybe especially it's the whales that pain me most of all, in an aquarium jail cell, made to do circus tricks for krill.

There were moments were I found the writing a little clunky and at other times overwrought. But I got over that. I even got to like, and look forward to, the author's fun with words: embiggen, cremains, thingified, embouchured mewls, ruggedized, empurpled, agglutinating into rubbishy gyres. She writes of Anaïs Nin, feeling ensorcelled. And do whales whalify, where we personify?

This is more about the world around us, than merely about whales.

I have to share this story from the book even though it seems a bit like plot-spoiling. The author was on a date in a Japanese restaurant. They tried the saké sampler and after awhile we're ruddy with alcohol and the heat of our new attraction. Go on, go on, I almost said out loud. At the end of the night, the server brought them some plum wine - umeshu - and emptied the last of the bottle into three shot glasses. He explained that the wine was from Fukushima Prefecture and was distilled before the nuclear accident there. Since then, Japanese farmers had stripped their orchards, shaved the bark off trees and replaced truckloads of soil with imported earth. The server explained that there would be new wine, but it wouldn't be Fukushima wine. There wouldn't be Fukushima wine ever again. So they drank the last of it, and tipped generously. And then: Can you forgive me, that I wasn't disgusted, that I wasn't ashamed? I thought that my date and I were the deserving recipients of a luminous and decadent gift, and later: it was arousing to me, to kiss him on the street with the sweet taste of the umeshu still faintly in his mouth.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

I have never forgotten the haunting "Critical Mass and Wind on the Water" by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfN8l... It's 5 1/2 minutes, and more powerful than anything I can write.

[Jolanta (knygupė) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5*
Kuo daugiau skaitau apie gyvūnus, tuo labiau mano nemeilė žmonijai didėja.

Banginiai, didžiausi Žemės gyvūnai, - protingi, bendraujantys, mylintys, sielvartaujantys...ant išnykimo ribos. Mokslininkai teigia, kad jų neteksim per ateinančius porą dešimtmečių. 
Ši knyga - ne tiek apie pačius banginius (nors kažkiek informacijos, žinoma, yra), kiek apie jų naikinimo istoriją. Anot autorės, šios knygos tikslas yra atkreipti visų mūsų dėmesį į tragediją. Tai - banginių pagalbos šauksmas. 

Aktyvistų prieš banginių medžiojimą didžiausias susirūpinimas yra apsaugoti besilaukiančias bangines. Kovojama, kad banginius medžiojančios kompanijos testuotų bangines dėl nėštumo. Tai, žinoma, komplikuota, bet kito būdo išvis nėra. O sumedžiojamos dažniausiai būtent lėtai judančios besilaukiancios milžinės.  

Beje, man labai makabriškai nuskambėjo Mio Bryce, Head of Japanese Studies (Macquarie University) išsakyta frazė, pasiremiant Shinto Budizmo etika: "Well, better to kill one whale than many, many other sea creatures to satisfy the appetites of the same number of people". 

O už tai, kas randama jų skrandžiuose tai jau tikrai atsakingi mes.


Rekomenduoju besidomintiems aplinkos apsauga.

[Denise Chojnacki · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic, Whales. Fascinating. The content? Hard to slog through. The reviews on this book were really good so I was looking forward to it, but in the end, the size of the book could have been about half what it was. There were interesting parts throughout, which is why I kept reading. However, the author would then go off into another direction that was hard to stick with. For instance, the last chapter was about sea monsters and their relation to how whales are perceived. I totally skimmed that. The epilogue was unnecessarily about 15 pages long. Maybe someone else with a more philosophical mind will get more out of this book but it was not for me.

[B · Rating 1 out of 5]

Forget it. I'm out.

I picked up this book because I thought Giggs was going to delve into the make-up of the oceans, the habits of whales, the symbiosis of whales with their environment...

That is so not what this book is.

I read the first 3 chapters.

Chapter 1 predominately focuses on the gory history of whaling.
Chapter 2 is part whale life (gestation, migration, etc.), which was GREAT. However, a lot of that chapter was also about the people on a whale watching boat with the author during an excursion (boring, stupid), and more about how humans have decimated both whale populations and their main food source (depressing, hopeless).
Chapter 3 had some information on evolution (v. cool) and whales in culture (still cool). BUT the majority of the chapter was about the author's experience in a museum she used to visit as a child. And, at that point, I was so done with the fractured narration I had to put the book down.

Honestly, if the book wasn't written by a drunken grad student, I may have limped on, but everything detailed above, + everything detailed below, was too much to take.

Drunken grad student? Well, if you didn't read my update WHILE I was still trying to read this book, I shared that I had to stop reading this book at night. Why? Because I had to keep a post-it and pen next to me while I was reading for jotting down the words I didn't know. Since I have a strict no-screens-before-bed policy, I had to wait until the next day to look those words up. This made me feel stupid. So I'd lay in bed, thinking "holy shit... am I stupid?" The next morning I would look up these words and realize: nope, I'm not stupid. Rebecca Giggs just wrote this book with a thesaurus open in her lap... and some of her archaic vocabulary wasn't even used correctly. So, instant flashbacks to college when assholes with word-of-the-day calendars taking Philosophy 101 would spew nonsense over buckets of Keystone.

Here are some words I didn't know. When I asked some of my (fellow English MA) friends, none of them knew any of these words either. That should tell you something, Giggs. If you Google synonyms, then see the word hasn't been used in 200yrs... maybe don't. It makes both you and your book off-putting.

-Exigencies
-Insuperable
-Midden
-Pellucid
-Peregrinations (this was one of the words that was used incorrectly)

I could go on, but you get the gist.

For a taste, this was the sentence which made me groan out loud and retire this book forever. Now I'll never know nuffin' 'bout whales:

Maybe what whales convey is the endlessness of the distant past: a tide of time that subducts outside of the realms of human life, and unfurls toward the bluesome distance of life's fair origins.

You used subducts incorrectly, and bluesome isn't a word. Most people didn't come to this book for your attempts at poetry. You are not Shakespeare, making up words and shit. Stay in your lane. Write a book that teaches us things. Or, better yet, don't write at all.

[A Novel Experiment · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, unlike other cetacean books I've read, really focuses on the different interactions between humans and whales as a lens for environmentalism.

I have mixed feelings about Fathoms, but I think generally I loved the content but not the style. There is an authorial intrusiveness that I didn't particularly care for. It seemed more like we were supposed to be going on this personal journey with the author, but I didn't really want to, and I often felt like the author was just telling me what to think. The writing is very visceral. The prologue left me in tears and the chapter on whale meat consumption made me want to vomit. The writing does at times try to be "poetic", and I just found it annoying. The content stands on its own without any lyrical prose.

[Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of our general knowledge about the whale is derived from its symbolic significance for the burgeoning green movement of the ’70s – we’ve all heard the catch-cry, seen the bumper stickers, “Save the whales!”. Giggs takes us back much further than that, to when the whale’s evolutionary ancestors walked on land. She brings us further forward too, to a world where the whale faces more threats than ever before. Plastics, sound pollution, even supposedly-responsible eco-tourism – all could be death knells for the whale. Fathoms is a meticulously researched book, rich in detail and emphatic in tone, one that draws our attention to something perhaps even larger than the whale: the legacy of humanity’s impact on the sea and skies.

An extended review of Fathoms is available at Keeping Up With The Penguins.

[Georgia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since finishing this book, I have started almost every conversation with “Can I tell you another wild whale thing?”

I‘ve started giving short lectures on topics like:
- why blue whales voices are getting deeper
- how whales can combat climate change
- why solar flares can mess up whale navigation
- how “whalefall” is a beautiful, gory mess of life and death
- what happens if sea gulls acquire a taste for whale meat
- how to determine the age of a whale using earwax
- the presence of whale products in outer space

The book is about whales. But it was also about people, pollution and how we tell stories about our planet. Giggs dives deep into questions that pique her curiosity, then writes beautifully about all the mind-bending things facts she learns along the way.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread in 2025
4.5*

[Scribe Publications]

Fathoms is a marvel: a glorious, prismatic, deeply affecting hymn to the beauty, majesty, and extremity of whales and the human imagining of them.
James Bradley

Fathoms reads like a poem. Its virtuoso thinking is a revelation. I can’t think of many books in which love for the world and uncompromising, ever-deepening rigour come together in this way. Time slows down. This book makes a permanent dent in the reader.
Maria Tumarkin

Fathoms took my breath away. Every page is suffused with magic and meaning. Humanity’s relationship with nature has never been more important or vulnerable, and we are truly fortunate that at such a pivotal moment, a writer of Rebecca Giggs’s calibre is here to capture every beautiful detail, every aching nuance. She is in a league of her own.
Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

[A] lyrical, wide-ranging meditation on whales and their complex relationship with humanity … Meticulously researched and full of fascinating information.
Books+Publishing

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs rips the metaphors off whales and brings us closer than we can usually get to the creatures themselves. Along the way, she shows us how intimately whales are shaping our lives, how they change air quality, and crime, and even our conception of time. I can't stop thinking about the connections she has unearthed, how a whale is connected to a meteor, a mother's breast, a landfill. Under the spell of her deliciously evocative prose, you get the sense that you are truly, finally, glimpsing a whale in full glory. Like the busks she writes about—tiny missives carved into whalebone corsets by sailors—this book leaves an imprint.
Lulu Miller, author of Why Fish Don’t Exist and co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia

Seafaring scrutiny of whales, their oceanic environment, and the dangers to their survival … Giggs presents … scholarship in crisp, creatively written chapters addressing the many layers of the whale population’s unique physiology and evolutionary history, sociality, above-water balletic athleticism, and enigmatic ‘biophony’ of their vocalisations. Most importantly, she analyses how their behaviour can be predictive for the Earth’s future … Giggs reiterates that the whale and its life, legacy, and precarious environmental state are reflective of the greater issues the Earth faces, from ecological upheaval to overconsumption. Whether describing the majesty of the blue whale or the human assault on sea ecology due to paper and plastic pollution, the author’s prose is poetic, beautifully smooth, urgently readable, and eloquently informative. Her passion for whales leaps off the page, urging readers to care and—even more so—become involved in their protection and preservation. Throughout the book, the author’s debut, she brilliantly exposes ‘how regular human life seeped into the habitats of wildlife, and how wildlife returned back to us, the evidence of our obliviousness.’ Refreshingly, she also reveals glimmers of hope regarding what whales can teach the human race about our capacity to ecologically coexist with the natural world. A thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus Reviews

Astonishing ... utterly original ... Fathoms is an attempt to interpret our contemporary moment – and in particular our relationship with the non-human world – through the glistening figure of the whale in all its myriad aspects ... The language of Fathoms has a remarkable, almost gothic intensity. The style is vivid and estranging and luridly compelling, full of weird lights and unexpected textures ... A remarkable literary event because it is a new and hugely ambitious kind of nature writing, verging on poetry. It is itself a whale cure, thrusting us into the dark intestine of the whale, among the indigestible plastics and other pollutants, the better to hear the conscience of tomorrow.
Andrew Fuhrmann, The Monthly

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs unravels a powerful non-fiction narrative, masterfully blending history, philosophy and science.
Dan Shaw, Happy Magazine

This book is nothing less than a small masterpiece. … Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms – the world in the whale is a remarkable meditation on, nominally, whales, but through them the delicacy and intricacy of human relationships with the environment, and the history and legacy of our intimate and devastating impact upon ecosystems … The book is a striking piece of narrative nonfiction, philosophical and personal at once wrestling with liminal vulnerabilities, fantasies, conceits and projections, and it deserves global attention. 4.5 STARS
Anna Westbrook, ArtsHub

Fathoms is horrific, poetic and profound; a morbid dirge shot through with celestial light. As well as being an extensively researched and deeply considered study, the book is also a wunderkammer of tales that illustrate the hot mess of human aggression, obliviousness and folly … Fathoms is a vast book, the scale of which brings to mind the blue whale, anatomically mysterious and the largest creature to have lived. Giggs weaves together cosmological phenomena with their deep-sea reverberations to give us a book that feels universal.
Justine Hyde, The Saturday Paper

With remarkable detective work, author Rebecca Giggs explores the habitats and migratory patterns of whales to reveal a great deal about them, and even more about us. It is a hauntingly beautiful examination of the moral force of animals, offering hope as well as despair.
Jeff Maynard, Herald Sun

A work of bright and careful genius. Equal parts Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard, Giggs masterfully combines lush prose with conscientious history and boots-on-the-beach reporting. With Giggs leading us gently by the hand we dive down, and down, and down, into the dark core of the whale, which, she convincingly reveals, is also the guts of the world.
Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails: an exploration

Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms is a triumph, a deliciously rich work of art that, as if by magic, combines exquisite prose that floats off the page and into your heart with scientific accuracy and epic scope. This is by far the best book about whales I have ever read. What an achievement!
Wendy Williams, author of The Language of Butterflies and New York Times bestseller The Horse: the epic history of our noble companion

One of the most beautifully written nonfiction books I have read in a long time. It's so hard to do justice to the immense importance of whales and the lessons they have for us all. Rebecca Giggs does an extraordinary job of bringing together the science, the history, and the brilliance and fragility of whales.
Christine Kenneally, author of The Invisible History of the Human Race

Fathoms is a work of profound insight and wonder.
x-pressmag.com.au

[N]ot only the creatures at the heart of this book come alive on these pages, but a whole ecology. Fathoms immediately earns its place in the pantheon of classics of the new golden age of environmental writing.
Stephen Sacks, Literary Hub

The book is a masterpiece. I am astonished that it is Giggs’s first, for it reads like the work of a far more experienced author ... Giggs’s exquisite prose is so striking as to be almost poetic, pulling the reader up constantly, either to savour a particularly apposite phrase, or to ponder a deep, unexpected connection. If a whale warrants a pause, then Fathoms warrants many.
Tim Flannery, The Australian

[An] astonishing, desolating, exasperating, utterly original debut ... The language of Fathoms has a remarkable, almost gothic intensity. The style is vivid and estranging and luridly compelling, full of weird lights and unexpected textures ... a remarkable literary event.
Andrew Fuhrmann, The Monthly

Lyrical, meditative and deeply researched, this gorgeous book by WA writer Rebecca Giggs is one to linger over.
The Weekend West

This is a heavy read, but a fascinating and vital one.
Ellen Cregan, Kill Your Darlings

Fathoms is beautifully written, always aiming for the bigger picture: what it means to live in the world; and what it means to be enthralled by the world we live in and destroying it … Fathoms is a glorious, beautiful and deeply important book.
Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader

Truly remarkable … Each page is full of wonder and revelation.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine

This is an unforgettable, meticulously researched work that examines the ways that we’re all connected — with whales, with the, environment and each other.
Eliza Henry-Jones, Organic Gardener Magazine

Meticulous research and stunning prose … unique, introspective and poetic.
Zoya Patel, Canberra Times

[A] moving homage to the whale … A book that begins with obsequies for a whale ends by enlarging our knowledge of, and sense of wonder about, this magnificent species. It is non-fiction told with the vivacity and moral authority that was once reserved for fiction.
Australian Financial Review

Giggs’ meticulous research is itself awesome. Every page has its breathtaking revelations … For all this wondrous detail, the whale remains a lens through which to consider humanity’s relationship with the environment … Fathoms’ exhilarating poetic language is richly allusive and orchestrated … this marvellous work of haunted wonder ends with a fiercely unabashed vision of humanity moved 'from indecision to action', for whales, for love, for the world.
Felicity Plunkett, Sydney Morning Herald

[A] delving, haunted and poetic debut. Giggs is worth reading for her spotlight observations and lyricism alone, but she also has an important message to deliver … [S]he uses whales as invitations to consider everything else: the selfie-isation of environmentalism, the inherent worth of parasites, Jungian psychoanalysis, solar storms, whale songs records going multiplatinum and so much more. In the cascade of mini-essays that results, Giggs comes off as much as a cultural critic as a naturalist.
Doug Bock Clark, The New York Times Book Review

There is much to marvel at here … Deeply researched and deeply felt, Giggs’ intricate investigation, beautifully revelatory and haunting, urges us to save the whales once again, and the oceans, and ourselves. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist

In the whale, Giggs truly does find the world. She finds clues that unlock how humans have engaged nature — tales of greed, aggression, wonder, desperation, longing, nostalgia, love, curiosity and obsession. Her prose is luminous … tracing humankind’s continuing intersection with these alluring creatures, Giggs ultimately uncovers seeds of hope and, planting them in her fertile mind, cultivates a lush landscape that offers remarkable views of nature, humanity and how we might find a way forward together. STARRED REVIEW
BookPage

A profound meditation … Giggs explores how whales have permeated our lives and the many ways we have invaded and transformed theirs. Each chapter orbits a different aspect of this long and fraught relationship — commodification, pollution, voyeurism, adoration, mythology — swerving wherever Giggs’s extensive research and fervent curiosity take her … Giggs’s prose is fluid, sensuous, and lyrical. She has a poet’s gift for startling and original imagery … The lushness of her sentences and the intensity of her vision inspire frequent rereading — not for clarity, but for sheer pleasure and depth of meaning.
LA Review of Books

[W]idens the aperture of our attention with a literary style so stunning that the reader may forget to blink ... In a story that extends across several continents, Ms. Giggs marshals lapidary language to give the crisis a compelling voice. Her prose, like the oceans in which her subjects roam, is immersive; her sentences submerge us in a sea of sensations … [M]ore descriptive than prescriptive concerning the plight of whales and, by implication, the health of the Earth. But as with George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant and E.B. White’s Death of a Pig, Ms. Giggs, tending the final hours of a humpback on an Australian beach, reminds us that paying attention to the close of another creature’s life can be its own form of moral instruction.
Danny Heitman, The Wall Street Journal

Immersive … Illustrating the interconnectedness of all life and the ways man's depredations travel from the smallest creatures to this largest of Earth's animals … In lyrical language, Giggs leads readers on a journey through underwater cultures and the place of whales in the chain of life. Recommended for readers interested in nature, ecology, and environmentalism.
Caren Nichter, Library Journal

A searching debut … Giggs displays a keen awareness of what it means to write about a creature whose future is just as uncertain as our own.
The Nation

Combining reportage, cultural criticism and poem as a call to action in the spirit of Rachel Carson, Giggs is an assured new voice in narrative non-fiction.
The Irish Times

Fathoms is brilliantly full of wonder.
The Economist

Masterly.
The New Yorker

Glorious and astounding.
Robbie Arnott

This remarkable study of whales examines much more than the magnificent creatures of the deep. Through brilliant detective work, Giggs explores the habitats and migratory patterns of whales to reveal a great deal about them, and even more about the human impact on the oceans.
The Advertiser

Some of the most alive, inventive writing on the planet is nature writing, and Giggs’ Fathoms is glorious proof. Ostentatious, mythic and strange, this is the kind of book that swallows you whole. Entirely fitting for its subject.
Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

Fathoms is the result of years of research and contemplation: a cultural, historical and ecological exploration of whales and their place in human life and thought … It is simply one of the most miraculous and illuminating accounts of animality I’ve come across. Read it, read the whole magnificent tome: you’ll leave it filled with renewed awe for cetacean existence.
Geordie Williamson, The Australian

A book like this shows the best of what reflective, creative non-fiction can do.
Kate Evans, ABC News

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

We depend on whales: they capture around 40% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, releasing it as poo which is then consumed by plankton. The removal of whales from the Earth's oceans contributes to global warming: in the last 100 years, whale populations declined somewhere between 60 and 90%, and the loss of these whales has a huge impact on our oceans and atmosphere. The "Save the Whale" campaign of the 1980s is seen as a success, and it is true that commercial whaling has been greatly reduced. However, whales are long-lived species, and their populations cannot easily bounce back. As well as that, our oceans are becoming more and more hostile to whales, due to plastic waste and to noise pollution. As Giggs says, the apocalypse has already come for whales: the remains of their population live in an environment of constant, painful noise, due to shipping and seismic surveying, where the water becomes more and more acid, and their blubber fills with toxins. Fathoms is a moving and meticulously researched book, but its content can make it painful reading: we are faced with deeply uncomfortable and painful truths about our environment and how our actions have led to so much loss. Giggs also writes beautifully about the different whale species, the ways in which whales can be said to have culture and language, and how such huge bodies perceive the world around them. She writes with great compassion about whales, and even when she discusses the horrors of commercial whaling she is even-handed and meticulous. This has been described as the best book about whales since Moby-Dick, and it's certainly the best modern book I've ever read about the whale: a thought-provoking and moving work that captured my imagination. Vital reading.

[Read By Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is maybe a 3.5 star for me. I learned a fair amount and certain parts were very interesting, and I love learning about Whales. The parts about their vision and whalefalls and how whales are impacted and impact the environment and the parts about whale songs were fantastic. I wanted to give this book 5 stars just for that.

Alas.

Two major problems arise here, both relating to writing style. The first is just an extreme lack of focus. The author would take huge tangents away from the central subject. I would zone out on audio for just a second and suddenly she'd be discussing the history of plastic manufacturing or Japanese cuisine history. None of it was TOTALLY unrelated, but I'd be left wondering, "Is this long tangent necessary?".

The second problem is that the author was determined to write this in the most pretenscious way possible. I am honestly baffled that she thought it was a good idea. Why would you overwrite a book about whales this much? Understand the general public. I consider myself well read with good reading comprehension and half the time she would say five nonsense sentences that sounded lyrical but didn't mean anything at all. It was severely off-putting. If I had read it physically, I probably would have DNF'd. It was a bit easier to bare as an audiobook; I could just float right past the unnecessary words.

A decent read overall, but I would only recommend if you really enjoy the subject matter.

[Karl · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was part of my nonfiction November, recommended by a popular booktuber; unfortunately I didn't pay close enough attention to the review. I wanted a book about whales, and while there are many facts about whales this is really a nonfiction narrative about man's relationship with nature, through all of time. For me the scope was so broad it ended up being about nothing. Also some found the prose to be lyrical, I found it to be bloated, like a student who is short on words for a term paper and needs to add fluff for word count. For example "In the lee of twentieth-century psychology, the suffix -philia has come to mean not just affection, but an abnormal attraction. Attraction that takes on an unmerited ardor, defiling that which it seeks to cosset, or cosseting the wrong thing - that which it would undo us, debase us, to get close to." Really?! Also I recall very few conversations with scientists, her research appears to be a coincidental walk on the beach, an Alaskan cruise, going to Japan to eat whale, and a lot of time on google. And unfortunately the best vignettes, the whale fall and beached whale, were repeats of NPR stories. Coincidence? This is my least favorite book I've read this year.

[Basia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book transformed me into a fountain of whale facts. It also had me rolling out multiple rolls of measuring tape that stretched from the living room to the dining room, knowing full well I was short by at least four more rolls, but attempting anyway to make more concrete the unparalleled colossus that is the blue whale. Rebecca Giggs is thorough in her exploration of the whaling industry, how whales got their charismatic fauna designation in the cultural imagination of much of the world (plus the distinct traits of different cetaceans that got jumbled in the process, like of course humpbacks are not the only sea singers, hello!), and the ecological perils that threaten the future of whales, without losing a drop of the poetic and marvelous pulse that surges through Fathoms. I admire a question she poses early on: “The duty of awe—wasn’t it?—care?” And I feel that she is persistent in confirming that yes, indeed it is.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I managed to get through the prologue and first chapter.
How in heavens name did this book make the shortlist for
The Stella Prize 2021?
Is it just me?....or did this book put you to sleep as well.

[Carmelo Valone · Rating 2 out of 5]

In all honesty, I really wanted to like this book and I wish I could have ignored it's flaws but (for me) it was too much, and felt kind of like immature writing when it came to so many aspects not with excluding the author's poetic prose.

Speaking as someone who has several masters degrees (one in writing and documentary strategies) I did appreciate the lovely prose, but the content was that of lacking in an overall new substance and impact on the subject of whales.


Honestly, a great rule of thumb that I often use to be sure that I give any topic the proper respect it deserves that of making sure that I see and understand the difference between making the the whale as being the subject versus the object and in this flowing prose, the whale was used as if it were an object that the reader could use as a catalyst for her own self involved self searching for meaningfulness in the world. It felt disrespectful and not unlike taking a selfie with a dead whale in the background (to paraphrase a scene in this book).

What I want to call this as an opportunity for some sort of privileged 'ecotourism' from what sounds like a beach walk turned whim and an accompanied deep drive google search. For me when we have any non-scientist writing a book about such a deeply complex subject, one should be aware of how to respect the subject enough to make more connections with real scientists and not use such broad generalizations around particular instances of 'whale stories and or whale facts'. As with science if you don't at least acknowledge the sources, it just starts to sound again like some conjecture mixed with some Google deep dives..

And yes, I understand that metaphor for the world and it's future could be a whale, but when you forget that the whale is that of one of the greatest creatures to have ever existed on this planet you might loose your reader. And if one wants to wax poetic and use philosophy as least refer to philosophy and life, and or its objects as a metaphor not unlike say: 'Foucault's Ship of Fools.'

Of course I probably sound a bit harsh, but it's only because I too have a deep love for whales, as having partially grown up on the sea and also posing that magic and wonder that is the whale...

Again this is my perspective and for me I'd prefer to have a scientist as an author trying to be and or being poetic versus a literary writer again for me is really not trying hard enough to understand a world of deeply important science.

Again I so wanted to like this book and I have a feeling that if only this author had taken more time, editing, research and meditation on this subject of whales; plus our own failure to keep our own ecosystem alive...tjis would have been a much better book.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A whale is a wonder not because it is the world's biggest animal, but because it augments our moral capacity. A whale shows us it is possible to care for that which lies outside our immediate sphere of action, but within our sphere of influence - we care deeply, you and I, about the whale because it is distant. Because it speaks to us of places we will not go. Because it magnifies the reach of our humanity, and reminds us of our collective ability to control ourselves, and of our part in a planetary ecology."

I was uncertain of reading Fathoms as a nonfiction book about whales isn't exactly a personal area of interest for me but only a few pages into the prologue, I knew it would be one of my fave nonfiction books of 2021. I could not have imagined a more expansive, considerate and informative exploration of whales in particular, cetaceans in general. It covers so much with such ease. Every time I thought up a possible tangent, Giggs already had it covered and nine others besides that I could never have imagined. It's a plethora of interesting facts as a mesmerising narrative, written in the most affecting spectacular and luscious prose.

Giggs connects topics, maps connections to spin out a vibrant tapestry about oceans and their fascinating ecology. She is particularly focused on how human intervention—benign or nefarious, intentional or inadvertent—has a huge impact on the hydrosphere, all the effects rippling out to remote regions where human presence is minimal. From industrial whaling to environmental change, there is a lot that endangers the future of whales & attendant animals. Giggs examines this and conservation, their place in our socio-culture, and what the future can hold for them & us.



(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Megan S · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am obsessed with whales and I love nature non-fiction. Robert Macfarlane is one of my favourite modern authors and the style between him and Giggs was said to be similar so I thought I'd enjoy it. But damn, this book was written by someone with the thesaurus on speed dial after tossing grammar out the window. It was impossible to read and enjoy. Where Macfarlane adds depth with his prose, Giggs' was muddy and incomprehensable. It was at points impossible to understand what she was actually trying to say - like reading Old English or something.
It saddens me because the subject of this book deserves a whole library. We have so much to learn about and from our whale cousins, and quickly, before we kill them with negligence and greed. This book just seemed like an author desperate to prove herself. She could have let the subject matter shine through and written a brilliant book, I am sure of it, there's no doubt she knows the subject, but she veiled it behind her incomprehensible prose. I hope someone, who is working less hard to prove themselves, writes this book and instead works hard to prove the value inherent in the subject. The life forms we call whales deserve better.

[Scribe Publications]

Fathoms is perhaps the finest book written about whales since Moby Dick was published 170 years ago. It’s also one of the best accounts I’ve ever read of the interaction, intended and unintended, between humans and other species — a work of genuinely literary imagination.
Verlyn Klinkenborg , New York Review of Books

Fathoms is a marvel: a glorious, prismatic, deeply affecting hymn to the beauty, majesty, and extremity of whales and the human imagining of them.
James Bradley

Fathoms reads like a poem. Its virtuoso thinking is a revelation. I can’t think of many books in which love for the world and uncompromising, ever-deepening rigour come together in this way. Time slows down. This book makes a permanent dent in the reader.
Maria Tumarkin

Fathoms took my breath away. Every page is suffused with magic and meaning. Humanity’s relationship with nature has never been more important or vulnerable, and we are truly fortunate that at such a pivotal moment, a writer of Rebecca Giggs’s calibre is here to capture every beautiful detail, every aching nuance. She is in a league of her own.
Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

[A] lyrical, wide-ranging meditation on whales and their complex relationship with humanity … Meticulously researched and full of fascinating information.
Books+Publishing

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs rips the metaphors off whales and brings us closer than we can usually get to the creatures themselves. Along the way, she shows us how intimately whales are shaping our lives, how they change air quality, and crime, and even our conception of time. I can't stop thinking about the connections she has unearthed, how a whale is connected to a meteor, a mother's breast, a landfill. Under the spell of her deliciously evocative prose, you get the sense that you are truly, finally, glimpsing a whale in full glory. Like the busks she writes about—tiny missives carved into whalebone corsets by sailors—this book leaves an imprint.
Lulu Miller, author of Why Fish Don’t Exist and co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia

Seafaring scrutiny of whales, their oceanic environment, and the dangers to their survival … Giggs presents … scholarship in crisp, creatively written chapters addressing the many layers of the whale population’s unique physiology and evolutionary history, sociality, above-water balletic athleticism, and enigmatic ‘biophony’ of their vocalisations. Most importantly, she analyses how their behaviour can be predictive for the Earth’s future … Giggs reiterates that the whale and its life, legacy, and precarious environmental state are reflective of the greater issues the Earth faces, from ecological upheaval to overconsumption. Whether describing the majesty of the blue whale or the human assault on sea ecology due to paper and plastic pollution, the author’s prose is poetic, beautifully smooth, urgently readable, and eloquently informative. Her passion for whales leaps off the page, urging readers to care and—even more so—become involved in their protection and preservation. Throughout the book, the author’s debut, she brilliantly exposes ‘how regular human life seeped into the habitats of wildlife, and how wildlife returned back to us, the evidence of our obliviousness.’ Refreshingly, she also reveals glimmers of hope regarding what whales can teach the human race about our capacity to ecologically coexist with the natural world. A thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus Reviews

Astonishing ... utterly original ... Fathoms is an attempt to interpret our contemporary moment – and in particular our relationship with the non-human world – through the glistening figure of the whale in all its myriad aspects ... The language of Fathoms has a remarkable, almost gothic intensity. The style is vivid and estranging and luridly compelling, full of weird lights and unexpected textures ... A remarkable literary event because it is a new and hugely ambitious kind of nature writing, verging on poetry. It is itself a whale cure, thrusting us into the dark intestine of the whale, among the indigestible plastics and other pollutants, the better to hear the conscience of tomorrow.
Andrew Fuhrmann, The Monthly

In Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs unravels a powerful non-fiction narrative, masterfully blending history, philosophy and science.
Dan Shaw, Happy Magazine

This book is nothing less than a small masterpiece. … Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms – the world in the whale is a remarkable meditation on, nominally, whales, but through them the delicacy and intricacy of human relationships with the environment, and the history and legacy of our intimate and devastating impact upon ecosystems … The book is a striking piece of narrative nonfiction, philosophical and personal at once wrestling with liminal vulnerabilities, fantasies, conceits and projections, and it deserves global attention. 4.5 STARS
Anna Westbrook, ArtsHub

Fathoms is horrific, poetic and profound; a morbid dirge shot through with celestial light. As well as being an extensively researched and deeply considered study, the book is also a wunderkammer of tales that illustrate the hot mess of human aggression, obliviousness and folly … Fathoms is a vast book, the scale of which brings to mind the blue whale, anatomically mysterious and the largest creature to have lived. Giggs weaves together cosmological phenomena with their deep-sea reverberations to give us a book that feels universal.
Justine Hyde, The Saturday Paper

With remarkable detective work, author Rebecca Giggs explores the habitats and migratory patterns of whales to reveal a great deal about them, and even more about us. It is a hauntingly beautiful examination of the moral force of animals, offering hope as well as despair.
Jeff Maynard, Herald Sun

A work of bright and careful genius. Equal parts Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard, Giggs masterfully combines lush prose with conscientious history and boots-on-the-beach reporting. With Giggs leading us gently by the hand we dive down, and down, and down, into the dark core of the whale, which, she convincingly reveals, is also the guts of the world.
Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails: an exploration

Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms is a triumph, a deliciously rich work of art that, as if by magic, combines exquisite prose that floats off the page and into your heart with scientific accuracy and epic scope. This is by far the best book about whales I have ever read. What an achievement!
Wendy Williams, author of The Language of Butterflies and New York Times bestseller The Horse: the epic history of our noble companion

One of the most beautifully written nonfiction books I have read in a long time. It's so hard to do justice to the immense importance of whales and the lessons they have for us all. Rebecca Giggs does an extraordinary job of bringing together the science, the history, and the brilliance and fragility of whales.
Christine Kenneally, author of The Invisible History of the Human Race

Fathoms is a work of profound insight and wonder.
x-pressmag.com.au

[N]ot only the creatures at the heart of this book come alive on these pages, but a whole ecology. Fathoms immediately earns its place in the pantheon of classics of the new golden age of environmental writing.
Stephen Sacks, Literary Hub

The book is a masterpiece. I am astonished that it is Giggs’s first, for it reads like the work of a far more experienced author ... Giggs’s exquisite prose is so striking as to be almost poetic, pulling the reader up constantly, either to savour a particularly apposite phrase, or to ponder a deep, unexpected connection. If a whale warrants a pause, then Fathoms warrants many.
Tim Flannery, The Australian

[An] astonishing, desolating, exasperating, utterly original debut ... The language of Fathoms has a remarkable, almost gothic intensity. The style is vivid and estranging and luridly compelling, full of weird lights and unexpected textures ... a remarkable literary event.
Andrew Fuhrmann, The Monthly

Lyrical, meditative and deeply researched, this gorgeous book by WA writer Rebecca Giggs is one to linger over.
The Weekend West

This is a heavy read, but a fascinating and vital one.
Ellen Cregan, Kill Your Darlings

Fathoms is beautifully written, always aiming for the bigger picture: what it means to live in the world; and what it means to be enthralled by the world we live in and destroying it … Fathoms is a glorious, beautiful and deeply important book.
Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader

Truly remarkable … Each page is full of wonder and revelation.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine

This is an unforgettable, meticulously researched work that examines the ways that we’re all connected — with whales, with the, environment and each other.
Eliza Henry-Jones, Organic Gardener Magazine

Meticulous research and stunning prose … unique, introspective and poetic.
Zoya Patel, Canberra Times

[A] moving homage to the whale … A book that begins with obsequies for a whale ends by enlarging our knowledge of, and sense of wonder about, this magnificent species. It is non-fiction told with the vivacity and moral authority that was once reserved for fiction.
Australian Financial Review

Giggs’ meticulous research is itself awesome. Every page has its breathtaking revelations … For all this wondrous detail, the whale remains a lens through which to consider humanity’s relationship with the environment … Fathoms’ exhilarating poetic language is richly allusive and orchestrated … this marvellous work of haunted wonder ends with a fiercely unabashed vision of humanity moved 'from indecision to action', for whales, for love, for the world.
Felicity Plunkett, Sydney Morning Herald

[A] delving, haunted and poetic debut. Giggs is worth reading for her spotlight observations and lyricism alone, but she also has an important message to deliver … [S]he uses whales as invitations to consider everything else: the selfie-isation of environmentalism, the inherent worth of parasites, Jungian psychoanalysis, solar storms, whale songs records going multiplatinum and so much more. In the cascade of mini-essays that results, Giggs comes off as much as a cultural critic as a naturalist.
Doug Bock Clark, The New York Times Book Review

There is much to marvel at here … Deeply researched and deeply felt, Giggs’ intricate investigation, beautifully revelatory and haunting, urges us to save the whales once again, and the oceans, and ourselves. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist

In the whale, Giggs truly does find the world. She finds clues that unlock how humans have engaged nature — tales of greed, aggression, wonder, desperation, longing, nostalgia, love, curiosity and obsession. Her prose is luminous … tracing humankind’s continuing intersection with these alluring creatures, Giggs ultimately uncovers seeds of hope and, planting them in her fertile mind, cultivates a lush landscape that offers remarkable views of nature, humanity and how we might find a way forward together. STARRED REVIEW
BookPage

A profound meditation … Giggs explores how whales have permeated our lives and the many ways we have invaded and transformed theirs. Each chapter orbits a different aspect of this long and fraught relationship — commodification, pollution, voyeurism, adoration, mythology — swerving wherever Giggs’s extensive research and fervent curiosity take her … Giggs’s prose is fluid, sensuous, and lyrical. She has a poet’s gift for startling and original imagery … The lushness of her sentences and the intensity of her vision inspire frequent rereading — not for clarity, but for sheer pleasure and depth of meaning.
LA Review of Books

[W]idens the aperture of our attention with a literary style so stunning that the reader may forget to blink ... In a story that extends across several continents, Ms. Giggs marshals lapidary language to give the crisis a compelling voice. Her prose, like the oceans in which her subjects roam, is immersive; her sentences submerge us in a sea of sensations … [M]ore descriptive than prescriptive concerning the plight of whales and, by implication, the health of the Earth. But as with George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant and E.B. White’s Death of a Pig, Ms. Giggs, tending the final hours of a humpback on an Australian beach, reminds us that paying attention to the close of another creature’s life can be its own form of moral instruction.
Danny Heitman, The Wall Street Journal

Immersive … Illustrating the interconnectedness of all life and the ways man's depredations travel from the smallest creatures to this largest of Earth's animals … In lyrical language, Giggs leads readers on a journey through underwater cultures and the place of whales in the chain of life. Recommended for readers interested in nature, ecology, and environmentalism.
Caren Nichter, Library Journal

A searching debut … Giggs displays a keen awareness of what it means to write about a creature whose future is just as uncertain as our own.
The Nation

Combining reportage, cultural criticism and poem as a call to action in the spirit of Rachel Carson, Giggs is an assured new voice in narrative non-fiction.
The Irish Times

Fathoms is brilliantly full of wonder.
The Economist

Masterly.
The New Yorker

Glorious and astounding.
Robbie Arnott

This remarkable study of whales examines much more than the magnificent creatures of the deep. Through brilliant detective work, Giggs explores the habitats and migratory patterns of whales to reveal a great deal about them, and even more about the human impact on the oceans.
The Advertiser

Some of the most alive, inventive writing on the planet is nature writing, and Giggs’ Fathoms is glorious proof. Ostentatious, mythic and strange, this is the kind of book that swallows you whole. Entirely fitting for its subject.
Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

Fathoms is the result of years of research and contemplation: a cultural, historical and ecological exploration of whales and their place in human life and thought … It is simply one of the most miraculous and illuminating accounts of animality I’ve come across. Read it, read the whole magnificent tome: you’ll leave it filled with renewed awe for cetacean existence.
Geordie Williamson, The Australian

A book like this shows the best of what reflective, creative non-fiction can do.
Kate Evans, ABC News

Giggs' work [Fathoms] … on whales, climate change and pollution has been one of the most affecting [books] I've read in a while.
Sophie Overett, The Courier-Mail

[Andrea Samorini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Non voglio riassumere i tanti aspetti pensieri e ragionamenti trattati, sulle balene e sul comportamento umano.
Renderei in modo riduttivo e non meritevole la qualità della scrittura di Rebecca Giggs.
Questo libro è una scoperta. Piacere, sorpresa ed eccitazione sono l’esperienza che mi ha accompagnato nelle ore di lettura.
Un libro importante, fuori scala per i miei parametri di giudizio

pag.101 _______________________________
In un articolo per "The Baffler", Barbara Ehrenreich ha osservato che il turismo naturalistico contemporaneo vende "qualcosa che le persone solevano cercare nella meditazione, nel digiuno, nella preghiera... Le società di osservazione delle balene da Sydney a Baja promettono 'esperienze spirituali' mediate dai cetacei".
Mentre il degrado ambientale è sempre più una fonte di ansia generalizzata, cercare incontri con animali di habitat lontani manifesta un caratteristico anelito moderno: la voglia di sentirsi rimpiccioliti e sconcertati da paesaggi in cui la natura resta palesemente sovrana, lussureggiante e vigorosa. Se non è proprio il genere di fame spirituale a cui Ehrenreich si riferisce, mi sembra quanto meno profondamente psicologica. Siamo ansiosi di incontrare il limite del mondo umano, e di guardare oltre.
___________________________________
WANT TO READ BOOK:
- Perché guardiamo gli animali? (John Berger)
- Leviatano ovvero La balena (Philip Hoare)
- Il mare intorno a noi (Rachel Carson)
- Primavera silenziosa (Rachel Carson)
- Siamo così intelligenti da capire l'intelligenza degli animali? (Frans de Waal)
- L'intelligenza dei delfini (John C. Lilly)
- Metà della Terra: Salvare il futuro della vita (Edward O. Wilson)
- Purezza e pericolo. Un'analisi dei concetti di contaminazione e tabù (Mary Douglas)
- In difesa del cibo (Michael Pollan)
- La vita e i segreti delle farfalle. Scienziati, ladri e collezionisti che hanno inseguito e raccontato l'insetto più bello del mondo (Wendy Williams)

[Violet · Rating 2 out of 5]

An incredibly rambling, animal-cruelty-apologist's guide on how to be semi-committed to the animal rights movement. I enjoyed the first few chapters, and from there the writing really went downhill for me. At one point, Giggs actually eats whale after going on and on about how sacred they are. Her continuous use of "it" instead of actual pronouns for the whales dehumanizes them further into the very object she complains the human race views these incredible animals as.

[Maya Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly researched look at the awe and wonder of the largest creature on earth. Giggs, though many different topics related to whales, endeavors to understand what makes them so awe inspiring and how interconnected we are to them. There are tons of fascinating facts in here (whale ear wax is to whales what tree rings are to trees, a single whale absorbs as much carbon as 1000 trees), all throughly researched and beautifully explained. She also dives deep (ha ha) into environmentalism and how human actions impact whales, which is fairly visible to us, and other parts of the marine ecosystem, some of which we will never truly know about. All in all a fascinating book and I highly recommend it.

[Dr. Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting and beautiful!!

CWs: Animal death, blood, animal cruelty, gore, climate crisis.