Dancing With Whales

We become ourselves through life's encounters: this is the premise of Dancing with Whales, a memoir in fifty-five episodes. The title essay tells how, at age 16, Betsy Burr met a pod of California gray whales surging onto a lonely beach, and danced among them. Over time she learned that rich encounters are everywhere, if we're open to possibilities. Come adventuring with her and see!

Feeling misunderstood by the other Hawaiian whales, Kaleo, who loves to sing, and Lani, who loves to dance, bring their artistic talents together.

Annabelle is a rag doll who has been the cherished companion of countless girls and women. She doesn't know who made her or even exactly what she is. But she does know the stories of those who have owned her.

Hans Thewissen, a leading researcher in the field of whale paleontology and anatomy, gives a sweeping first-person account of the discoveries that brought to light the early fossil record of whales. As evidenced in the record, whales evolved from herbivorous forest-dwelling ancestors that resembled tiny deer to carnivorous monsters stalking lakes and rivers and to serpentlike denizens of the coast. Thewissen reports on his discoveries in the wilds of India and Pakistan, weaving a narrative that reveals the day-to-day adventures of fossil collection, enriching it with local flavors from South Asian culture and society. The reader senses the excitement of the digs as well as the rigors faced by scientific researchers, for whom each new insight gives rise to even more questions, and for whom at times the logistics of just staying alive may trump all science. In his search for an understanding of how modern whales live their lives, Thewissen also journeys to Japan and Alaska to study whales and wild dolphins. He finds answers to his questions about fossils by studying the anatomy of otters and porpoises and examining whale embryos under the microscope. In the book's final chapter, Thewissen argues for approaching whale evolution with the most powerful tools we have and for combining all the fields of science in pursuit of knowledge.

Bluetune is a whale born on a cold winter night in the deepest trench of the North Pacific Ocean, and his life begins with a profound challenge from the very first day. This challenge, right from the moment of his birth, deprives him of the opportunity for an ordinary life and compels him to adapt to his unique circumstances. He spends his early years with his mother, who is his sole caretaker. She ingeniously strives to adjust their circumstances as much as possible while imparting life skills and responsibilities to her child. However, in his teenage years, Bluetune’s life is confronted with deep challenges. These challenges, one after another, push him into the abyss of despair and a sense of defeat. Nevertheless, he learns to gather his inner strength and boldly confront these adversities, methodically unraveling their knots. He learns that nothing is without purpose, and no problem is without a solution. Bluetune’s life story serves as a representation of the journey undertaken by all those who transform the challenges of their lives into victories.

In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda’s strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.

As a mythical creature, the whale has been responsible for many transformations in the world. It is an enchanting being that humans have long felt a connection to. In the contemporary environmental imagination, whales are charismatic megafauna feeding our environmentalism and aspirations for a better and more sustainable future. Using multispecies ethnography, Whale Snow explores how everyday the relatedness of the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska and the bowhead whale forms and transforms “the human” through their encounters with modernity. Whale Snow shows how the people live in the world that intersects with other beings, how these connections came into being, and, most importantly, how such intimate and intense relations help humans survive the social challenges incurred by climate change. In this time of ecological transition, exploring multispecies relatedness is crucial as it keeps social capacities to adapt relational, elastic, and resilient. In the Arctic, climate, culture, and human resilience are connected through bowhead whaling. In Whale Snow we see how climate change disrupts this ancient practice and, in the process, affects a vital expression of Indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately, though, this book offers a story of hope grounded in multispecies resilience.