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The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North
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The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North

Average customer rating:

Who are we to say
a wonderful story

The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventures with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North
Jim Nollman
Manufacturer: Sierra Club Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Man Who Talks to Whales: The Art of Interspecies Communication

ASIN: 1578050871

Book Description

Animal communication expert Jim Nollman has sung with orcas, plucked a Jew's harp in waters teeming with humpback whales, and shaken rattles in the company of bottlenose dolphins. Now, in this heartfelt and quirky true adventure story, Nollman and two artist friends set out for Canada's vast Mackenzie Delta, electric guitar and underwater sound equipment in tow, to make music with belugas--the elusive white whales of the Arctic.
Traveling the expanses of this beautiful northern land, the three friends unwittingly find themselves at the center of a heated controversy over the Beaufort Sea belugas: Why have the whales stopped coming into the Mackenzie Delta, possibly jeopardizing their own calves, who live the first part of their lives in these shallow, warm waters? As they attempt to unravel the mystery, they encounter various intriguing characters now laying claim to the resources of the Mackenzie Delta region--Native people (who are allowed to hunt the whales), wildlife officials, and oil company engineers--all vividly described by Nollman. Along the way, he also conveys both the wonders and the realities of being deep in the wilderness--experiencing the connectedness of all living things while scratching the bites of the world's most fearsome mosquitos.
With its rich and passionate nature writing evoking lovely and remote landscapes, The Beluga Café suggests profound metaphors for our time about animal rights and animal intelligence, the role of science in conservation, the politics of extinction, and the place of art in the epic struggle to save the natural world.

Customer Reviews:

Who are we to say.......2005-07-06

This is a very powerful book. It is not the typical wilderness adventure book. Unlike the TV nature show, amazing things don't happen every few mintutes. In fact few amazing things happen at all, yet the whole experience of small wilderness experiences add up to a book that will take you to another place.

"It seems critical to me to devote some part of each year to this nothingness, this time without time, this confrontation with animal demons real and imagined, learning once again how to surrender to some internal environment made external."

Nollman confronts the question of us versus them strongly in this book with the us being modern society and them being animals, nature and native cultures. He feels the chance has been lost to learn from "them" in a way that everyone would benefit, instead of disregarding that knowledge and destroying it.

Chapter 15 begins with a wonderful quote by Carl Safina from Song for the Blue Ocean. "Ecosystems are now like history books with many of the pages ripped out. And when people come along there is no way for them to know what was on those torn-out pages. Their values are not constructed around the abundance that once filled those holes. They accept the blank parts as though they've always been there."

Nollman pulls no punches in what he experiences on this trip including describing the constant difficult and loving give and take among the three soujourners.

This is a strong book and well worth the time to read it.

a wonderful story.......2005-03-30

This is a quite wonderful story.... a music of words.... ebbing and flowing between near-surreal and ultra-surreal with only a few intrusions of pure didactic rationalism. Buy it and read it.

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