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Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
A revelatory tale of science, adventure, and modern myth. A New York Times Notable Book of 2011. One of NPR's Best Books of 2011. One of Janet Maslin's Ten Picks for 2011.
When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories.
Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable. With each new discovery, Hohn learns of another loose thread, and with each successive chase, he comes closer to understanding where his castaway quarry comes from and where it goes. In the grand tradition of Tony Horwitz and David Quammen, Moby-Duck is a compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity.
When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories.
Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable. With each new discovery, Hohn learns of another loose thread, and with each successive chase, he comes closer to understanding where his castaway quarry comes from and where it goes. In the grand tradition of Tony Horwitz and David Quammen, Moby-Duck is a compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2011
About the author
Donovan Hohn
5 books62 followersDonovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. Moby-Duck, his first book, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism and runner-up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn is now a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he has begun work on a second book.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 678 reviews
June 15, 2023
Plastic Duckie, You’re the one. Well, one of 28,800 anyway.
Donovan Hohn begins his tale with an accident at sea. A container ship, in the face of fifty-foot waves, rolls sufficiently to dump more than a few containers, those box-car sized giant legos that we use to transport stuff from here to there. One such dumpee held a large quantity of plastic bath toys. Included were beavers, frogs, turtles and the most-familiar, ducks. Not rubber, mind you, but plastic. His aim is to find as many places as possible where the friendly critters might have beached. Did they all? Beach, that is? What happened to these things? That is the crux of the investigation. Or at least the Maguffin of the story, as Hohn, in questing after ultimate ports of the lost bath toys, finds many items of interest along the way.
The location of the spill is discovered in short order, but we learn that such information is a closely held corporate secret. Hohn sets off on a variety of individual adventures. He travels on a thousand-foot-plus container ship through the very waters where the bath toys had taken a tumble. They disembarked south of the Aleutians, in a current known as the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre. I presume they proceeded to gimble in the waves. (Ok, Ok, pushing it. I know). Is there any chance that they managed to find their way into Arctic waters and then through and down to the Atlantic coast? I’m not telling.
From the author's site
He joins Chris Pallister, head of an Alaskan NGO, trying to clean up the mass quantities of floating crap that winds up on parts of the Alaskan coast. Chris had had an eye-opening experience in the political world
As with any good book there are at least as many questions raised as answers found. And as with most good stories, it is about the journey, not the destination.
We learn something about giant container ships, why they are so gigantic, how they fare in the ocean, and learn what special oceanic tricks might have caused the ducks to dive. We learn a fair bit about ocean currents and the more sprightly gyres. There is significant information on the status of the Arctic Ocean and a compelling discussion on the nature of “the commons." Here are a few more nuggets. Albatrosses go after floating plastic because it tends to be encrusted with barnacles. Only 5 percent of plastics get recycled. Among the many theories of the nature of the North Pole, Plato thought that the pole lay at the head of a giant tunnel through which water circulated to the earth’s core. Sounds like a theory Ted Stevens could get behind. One of my favorite factoids in the book was why the federal government promoted the use of bath toys in the 1940s. It is bound to make you smile.
So, read, enjoy, learn.
Donovan Hohn - from the Telegraph
This brings us to some other aspects. First I have to offer up a large asterisk. I found this book to be a rather slow read. But I am not sure how much was the book and how much was me. For reasons that I will not go into here, my spirits have been at a low ebb for a week or so, and I might have had a tough time getting through The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck let alone a somewhat lengthier tale of her distant relations. But now that I have made my excuses…
For a book like this to succeed it must engage the reader, it must offer new information, and it must put you at ease with your Virgil. It does not hurt if it is a fast read, and it is a good thing if the reader cares about the author’s quest. There is a wealth of information here, but I felt that information appeared at the peaks of waves and the distance between peaks was sometimes too great. Hohn seems like a pretty decent guy, likeable, intelligent, inquisitive. He reports about his struggles coping with being away from home for considerable durations, once as his first child is about to pop out. Kudos to the missus for her extreme understanding and forebearance. Hohn comes across well, but I felt that there was maybe a bit too much of his personal experience bobbing to the surface at times, and that it slowed down the story he was telling. I will not tell the final result of his journey of discovery, but I did feel that he drifted off course a time or two and that also slowed things down.
So bottom line is that this is a book that has a wealth of information to impart. You will be surprised enough at some items and will learn enough overall to make this a worthwhile read, despite running into an occasional doldrum.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages
A nice article about Hohn and the beginnings of the book, from the University of Michigan
Time to sing along
July 19, 2017 – National Geographic - reporting about a new study on plastic in our environment - A Whopping 91% of Plastic Isn't Recycled - by Laura Parker
If you want more detail, here is the study from the journal Science to which the NatGeo article refers - Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made - by Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law
January 25, 2018 - NY Times - Everything is definitely not ducky - Billions of Plastic Pieces Litter Coral in Asia and Australia - by Veronique Greenwood
March 22, 2018 - National Geographic - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is - by Laura Parker - Interesting new science on the contents of the infamous patch.
This dead albatross chick was found with plastics in its stomach on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Marine plastic can be dangerous to wildlife. - text from the above article - Photograph by Dan Clark, USFWS/AP
March 28, 2018 - NY YTimes - Rubber, Yucky? Say it ain't so - Your Cute Rubber Duck May Be a Haven for Bacteria - by Ceylan Yeginsu
July 11, 2018 - National Geographic - The last straw? A Running List of Action on Plastic Pollution - By Brian Clark Howard and Sarah Gibbens
September 24, 2018 - Adrift is a poem by Bao Phi inspired by the rubber duckie spill
January 4, 2019 - Floating trash collector has setback in Pacific Garbage Patch - By Laura Parker
April 1, 2019 - Two whales wash up dead with more than a hundred pounds of plastic in their stomachs - by Walter Einenkel
Donovan Hohn begins his tale with an accident at sea. A container ship, in the face of fifty-foot waves, rolls sufficiently to dump more than a few containers, those box-car sized giant legos that we use to transport stuff from here to there. One such dumpee held a large quantity of plastic bath toys. Included were beavers, frogs, turtles and the most-familiar, ducks. Not rubber, mind you, but plastic. His aim is to find as many places as possible where the friendly critters might have beached. Did they all? Beach, that is? What happened to these things? That is the crux of the investigation. Or at least the Maguffin of the story, as Hohn, in questing after ultimate ports of the lost bath toys, finds many items of interest along the way.
The location of the spill is discovered in short order, but we learn that such information is a closely held corporate secret. Hohn sets off on a variety of individual adventures. He travels on a thousand-foot-plus container ship through the very waters where the bath toys had taken a tumble. They disembarked south of the Aleutians, in a current known as the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre. I presume they proceeded to gimble in the waves. (Ok, Ok, pushing it. I know). Is there any chance that they managed to find their way into Arctic waters and then through and down to the Atlantic coast? I’m not telling.
From the author's site
He joins Chris Pallister, head of an Alaskan NGO, trying to clean up the mass quantities of floating crap that winds up on parts of the Alaskan coast. Chris had had an eye-opening experience in the political world
the first day he [Pallister] reported to duty [as a staffer for Alaska’s Republican senator Frank Murkowski] …Murkowski assigned him the task of rifling through the Endangered Species Act for loopholes.There are those who contend that Chris’s efforts do nothing to solve the problem, that cleaning up the extant mess only gives cover to those who are responsible for it, and drains available resources from better targeted efforts. Hohn sails with marine scientists and checks out a Pacific location known as the Great Garbage Patch. It turns out there is an explanation for why flotsam collects in certain places, and one may conjure images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. He sails on a Canadian Ice Breaker, visits far-north native communities, visits the factory where the floaters were born, even checks in with the child psychology professionals who had a hand in the toys’ design.
As with any good book there are at least as many questions raised as answers found. And as with most good stories, it is about the journey, not the destination.
We learn something about giant container ships, why they are so gigantic, how they fare in the ocean, and learn what special oceanic tricks might have caused the ducks to dive. We learn a fair bit about ocean currents and the more sprightly gyres. There is significant information on the status of the Arctic Ocean and a compelling discussion on the nature of “the commons." Here are a few more nuggets. Albatrosses go after floating plastic because it tends to be encrusted with barnacles. Only 5 percent of plastics get recycled. Among the many theories of the nature of the North Pole, Plato thought that the pole lay at the head of a giant tunnel through which water circulated to the earth’s core. Sounds like a theory Ted Stevens could get behind. One of my favorite factoids in the book was why the federal government promoted the use of bath toys in the 1940s. It is bound to make you smile.
So, read, enjoy, learn.
Donovan Hohn - from the Telegraph
This brings us to some other aspects. First I have to offer up a large asterisk. I found this book to be a rather slow read. But I am not sure how much was the book and how much was me. For reasons that I will not go into here, my spirits have been at a low ebb for a week or so, and I might have had a tough time getting through The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck let alone a somewhat lengthier tale of her distant relations. But now that I have made my excuses…
For a book like this to succeed it must engage the reader, it must offer new information, and it must put you at ease with your Virgil. It does not hurt if it is a fast read, and it is a good thing if the reader cares about the author’s quest. There is a wealth of information here, but I felt that information appeared at the peaks of waves and the distance between peaks was sometimes too great. Hohn seems like a pretty decent guy, likeable, intelligent, inquisitive. He reports about his struggles coping with being away from home for considerable durations, once as his first child is about to pop out. Kudos to the missus for her extreme understanding and forebearance. Hohn comes across well, but I felt that there was maybe a bit too much of his personal experience bobbing to the surface at times, and that it slowed down the story he was telling. I will not tell the final result of his journey of discovery, but I did feel that he drifted off course a time or two and that also slowed things down.
So bottom line is that this is a book that has a wealth of information to impart. You will be surprised enough at some items and will learn enough overall to make this a worthwhile read, despite running into an occasional doldrum.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages
A nice article about Hohn and the beginnings of the book, from the University of Michigan
Time to sing along
July 19, 2017 – National Geographic - reporting about a new study on plastic in our environment - A Whopping 91% of Plastic Isn't Recycled - by Laura Parker
If you want more detail, here is the study from the journal Science to which the NatGeo article refers - Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made - by Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law
January 25, 2018 - NY Times - Everything is definitely not ducky - Billions of Plastic Pieces Litter Coral in Asia and Australia - by Veronique Greenwood
March 22, 2018 - National Geographic - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is - by Laura Parker - Interesting new science on the contents of the infamous patch.
This dead albatross chick was found with plastics in its stomach on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Marine plastic can be dangerous to wildlife. - text from the above article - Photograph by Dan Clark, USFWS/AP
March 28, 2018 - NY YTimes - Rubber, Yucky? Say it ain't so - Your Cute Rubber Duck May Be a Haven for Bacteria - by Ceylan Yeginsu
July 11, 2018 - National Geographic - The last straw? A Running List of Action on Plastic Pollution - By Brian Clark Howard and Sarah Gibbens
September 24, 2018 - Adrift is a poem by Bao Phi inspired by the rubber duckie spill
January 4, 2019 - Floating trash collector has setback in Pacific Garbage Patch - By Laura Parker
April 1, 2019 - Two whales wash up dead with more than a hundred pounds of plastic in their stomachs - by Walter Einenkel
August 25, 2024
“Every powerful icon invites both idolatry and iconoclasm, and in the bestiary of American childhood, there is now no creature more iconic than the rubber duck.”
I was all ready to haughtily huff and puff about adults being obsessed with children’s toys. Then I took a long hard look at my life.
Exhibit A: actual earrings I was gifted for my 40th birthday:
And I realized that I have also fallen victim to the yellow duck craze. I mean, who wouldn’t? They are adorable, and if my bathroom in places looks like a rubber duck sanctuary, then so be it.
Exhibit B: a representative photo of my bathroom:
“Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck’s closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials.”
Here I was, browsing the library ocean-themed section for a Jacques Cousteau book, as one does periodically, and suddenly my eye was drawn to the giant rubber duck on the cover of this one. Moby-Duck, huh? There was no way I was not going to get it.
Exhibit C: another representative shot of my bathroom. Hmm, maybe I have a duck problem…
One day in 1992 a container ship lost some of its cargo in a storm in the Pacific Ocean. That cargo contained “28,880 plastic animals produced in Chinese factories for the bathtubs of America — 7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks”. Years later they started washing up on the shores, and in the retelling of the entire story the yellow ducks outcompeted - perhaps out of sheer cuteness - its plastic floating companions and it became a saga of rubber ducks lost at sea. The sheer incongruity of the image of an adorable red-beaked yellow duck floating in the vastness of the ocean is irresistible. At least to me. And apparently to Donovan Hohn who set out to see where the yellow duck saga takes him.
“Spot a yellow duck dropped atop the seaweed at the tide line, ask yourself where it came from, and the next thing you know you’re way out at sea, no land in sight, dog-paddling around in mysteries four miles deep. You’re wondering when and why yellow ducks became icons of childhood. You want to know what it’s like inside the toy factories of Guangdong. You’re marveling at the scale of humanity’s impact on this terraqueous globe and at the oceanic magnitude of your own ignorance.”
Hohn’s journey in the search of the ducks leads him to Alaskan beaches where tons of rubbish idiot humans toss wash up (“Alaska — snowcapped mountains, icebergs, breaching whales, wild beaches strewn with yellow ducks. How could I say no?”) to factories in China mass-producing bathtub toys, to an ocean journey through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a voyage on a container ship, and going by ship through the Arctic waters. And along the way there are strange and sometimes fascinating people he comes in contact with, and musings on ecology and pollution, and origins of the yellow rubber duck obsessions, consumerism, etc.
It’s a travelogue inspired by yellow plastic ducks, rambling and quirky, and actually quite fun. Besides those elusive ducks, it doesn’t have much of a focus, but it’s not that annoying, maybe because Hohn’s voyages make the rambling framework actually work, drifting along like the lost bath toys do. Those ducks are almost McGuffins at time, but that’s a set-up I had no big issues with since Hohn’s chosen topics are interesting. Usually the lack of focus annoys me, but maybe reading this book outside in the sunshine relaxed my inner grumpiness just enough to let it go.
3.5
March 19, 2012
A pretty disappointing book all around. Hohn had the opportunity to tell a great story about the bath toys that were lost at sea in a shipping accident, comment on the environmental threats facing our oceanic ecosystems, and tell a personal story.
Instead he threw together a horribly disjointed rant with a few funny comments here and there. Half the time he's just describing and telling the reader how he feels. The rest of the time he briefly comments on a certain topic before randomly changing to another (eg. one second he's talking about ocean currents while on a boat in the pacific, the next he's talking about playing with his toddler in NY). Most of all, there is little commentary about the bath toys themselves. He mentions them in passing, but really doesn't go anywhere with that theme.
What he does a good job of is talking about the chemicals and other pollutants that are increasingly appearing in our oceans. He also does some good research and explains what are the "garbage patches" that now exist in the pacific ocean convergence zones. He also goes into some detail about how the modern shipping industry works, and how interconnected our world is when it comes to things like plastic.
Overall, a huge disappointment.
Instead he threw together a horribly disjointed rant with a few funny comments here and there. Half the time he's just describing and telling the reader how he feels. The rest of the time he briefly comments on a certain topic before randomly changing to another (eg. one second he's talking about ocean currents while on a boat in the pacific, the next he's talking about playing with his toddler in NY). Most of all, there is little commentary about the bath toys themselves. He mentions them in passing, but really doesn't go anywhere with that theme.
What he does a good job of is talking about the chemicals and other pollutants that are increasingly appearing in our oceans. He also does some good research and explains what are the "garbage patches" that now exist in the pacific ocean convergence zones. He also goes into some detail about how the modern shipping industry works, and how interconnected our world is when it comes to things like plastic.
Overall, a huge disappointment.
Read
February 24, 2011I never could get all the way through Moby Dick. Maybe I'll have better luck with Moby Duck.
October 8, 2013
This is just the kind of random, wide-ranging book I love: part memoir, part travelogue, part philosophical musing on human culture and our impact on the environment, Moby-Duck is an uncategorizable gem. In 1992 a pallet of ‘Friendly Floatees’ bath toys fell off a container ship in a storm in the north Pacific. Over the past two decades those thousands of plastic animals have made their way around the world, informing oceanographic theory and delighting children – but it’s a more complicated story than that.
Hohn’s obsessive quest for the origin of the bath toys and the details of their high seas journey takes on the momentousness of his literary antecedent, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale : “Now whenever we [Hohn and the second officer on his exploring ship] pass each other in the corridors or in the mess, he greets me with Ahab’s famous question: ‘Hast seen the white whale?’ To which I reply, ‘Hast seen the yellow duck?’”
Hohn’s wit allows him to navigate carefully between blithe delight at the spectacle of the floating ducks and despair at our destruction of the oceans. He visits a Chinese factory and sees plastics being made; he volunteers on a beach-cleaning mission in Alaska, where they find and airlift out over fifty tons of waste, mostly plastic washed up on shore.
I join him in feeling a mixture of hope and disgust about the environment: “I feel an irresolvable ambivalence, torn between my fondness for hominids, who are splendid and hilarious as well as idiotic, and my wish that we could populate the world without ruining it.” Like Bill Bryson or particularly Paul Collins (one of my favorite writers on any subject), Hohn writes clever, heartfelt, interdisciplinary nonfiction – just the kind of books I want to read (and write).
Hohn’s obsessive quest for the origin of the bath toys and the details of their high seas journey takes on the momentousness of his literary antecedent, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale : “Now whenever we [Hohn and the second officer on his exploring ship] pass each other in the corridors or in the mess, he greets me with Ahab’s famous question: ‘Hast seen the white whale?’ To which I reply, ‘Hast seen the yellow duck?’”
Hohn’s wit allows him to navigate carefully between blithe delight at the spectacle of the floating ducks and despair at our destruction of the oceans. He visits a Chinese factory and sees plastics being made; he volunteers on a beach-cleaning mission in Alaska, where they find and airlift out over fifty tons of waste, mostly plastic washed up on shore.
I join him in feeling a mixture of hope and disgust about the environment: “I feel an irresolvable ambivalence, torn between my fondness for hominids, who are splendid and hilarious as well as idiotic, and my wish that we could populate the world without ruining it.” Like Bill Bryson or particularly Paul Collins (one of my favorite writers on any subject), Hohn writes clever, heartfelt, interdisciplinary nonfiction – just the kind of books I want to read (and write).
March 20, 2011
I could be flip, and just say that this book told me more about ducks than I really wanted to know. But to be fair, there's a lot of fairly dense scientific information about plastics pollution, global warming, and ocean currents. Hohn interviewed real scientists, and a few whose science is more questionable. The information is interspersed by Hohn's thoughts on such things as the artistic representation of children, his parents' divorce, the popularity of duck breeds, his myopia, Melville, his youthful appearance, Ernie on Sesame Street, Hohn's pregnant wife...do you sense a trend here? Keep reading till the end and you're rewarded with a totally new interpretation of "Moby-Dick." Early in the book, two peripheral characters go out of their way to help Hohn in his quest. One is named Bethe. Her boyfriend is Waynn. Hohn comments that perhaps they were attracted to each other because they both have oddly-spelled first names. If you find this an amusing comment, perhaps you'll enjoy the book. If you, like me, find it gratuitous and snide, then you probably won't. And--whether it's the fault of the author or the publisher--there's no index to the book, which is inexcusable.
Shelved as 'didntfinish-yet'
April 28, 2019Ahhhh. This was such an interesting book but it just has so many digressions, so many rabbit holes to dive down, so much exposition.... I just drifted away and never quite found my way back. Yet.
***
Just when you think there is nothing new under the sun, along comes something totally fucking insanely surprising.
Here is a totally true story, which I am not just making up so that I will win the First Reads giveaway for this book (but please can I have this book, Goodreads Gods??): Donovan Hohn, the author of this amazingly crazy book, was doing a reading in Brooklyn on the same day that this guy was doing a reading. I srsly love The Oatmeal, and although it was a super hard choice, I went to Matthew Inman's reading instead of the one about the rubber ducks. You've been to book readings, right? Unless it's Chuck Palahniuk, there's like a dozen or so wide-eyed nerds and the author is shy and halting and sweet, and everyone leaves happy, clutching a signed new book. Well, The Oatmeal is fucking crazy popular, and there were so many people there, they had to move the reading from the bookstore to a bar across the street, and then they had to close the fucking bar because there were so many damn sweaty internet-comics fans. Plus the "reading" was like this slick PowerPoint thing, and also Matthew turned out to be younger than me and incredibly cute, in a very normal sort of way, which is exactly not what you want in your writer of weird defensively sarcastic and bitter internet comics, you know? ANYWAY, the goddamn point is why did I make the choice to go see Matthew instead of Donovan? And also that I want to read this book really bad and so maybe a certain contest fairy will grant it to me?
***
Just when you think there is nothing new under the sun, along comes something totally fucking insanely surprising.
Here is a totally true story, which I am not just making up so that I will win the First Reads giveaway for this book (but please can I have this book, Goodreads Gods??): Donovan Hohn, the author of this amazingly crazy book, was doing a reading in Brooklyn on the same day that this guy was doing a reading. I srsly love The Oatmeal, and although it was a super hard choice, I went to Matthew Inman's reading instead of the one about the rubber ducks. You've been to book readings, right? Unless it's Chuck Palahniuk, there's like a dozen or so wide-eyed nerds and the author is shy and halting and sweet, and everyone leaves happy, clutching a signed new book. Well, The Oatmeal is fucking crazy popular, and there were so many people there, they had to move the reading from the bookstore to a bar across the street, and then they had to close the fucking bar because there were so many damn sweaty internet-comics fans. Plus the "reading" was like this slick PowerPoint thing, and also Matthew turned out to be younger than me and incredibly cute, in a very normal sort of way, which is exactly not what you want in your writer of weird defensively sarcastic and bitter internet comics, you know? ANYWAY, the goddamn point is why did I make the choice to go see Matthew instead of Donovan? And also that I want to read this book really bad and so maybe a certain contest fairy will grant it to me?
January 14, 2022
Il 10 gennaio 1992, una nave portacontainer che viaggiava a sud delle Aleutine, partita da Hong Kong e diretta a Tacoma, nello stato di Washington, s’imbatté in una tremenda tempesta che le fece perdere gran parte del suo carico. L'incidente ha avuto ripercussioni quasi mitiche, perché tra la merce smarrita c'erano 7.200 pacchetti di giocattoli per vasca da bagno. Ogni set includeva quattro pezzi: una tartaruga blu, una rana verde, un castoro rosso e una paperella gialla. Nell’immaginario collettivo una valanga di animaletti alla deriva tra le correnti oceaniche ha un’eco pazzesca, soprattutto quando vengono rinvenuti sulle coste più disparate, tra cui l’Alaska e il Canada; è in parte per questo motivo che Donovan Hohn ha deciso di seguirne le orme.
Hohn era insegnante al Friends Seminary di Manhattan quando sentì parlare per la prima volta di questa storia. Gli interrogativi erano molti, e tutti senza risposta, perché i misteri che avvolgono i trasporti via mare sono parecchi: da dove venivano i giocattoli? Di cosa erano fatti? Come sarebbero stati dopo 15 anni alla deriva nell’oceano?
Comincia così un viaggio alla ricerca dell’origine di questi animaletti di plastica, che porta Hohn a voler rispondere a molti altri interrogativi. Che tipo di persone fanno della caccia ai relitti la loro attività preferita e come vengono tracciate le linee di battaglia tra conservazionisti e ambientalisti? Qual è l’elemento più inquinante di tutti? Quali battaglie vale la pena di combattere, quelle estetiche e di facciata (come la pulizia delle spiagge...) oppure solo quelle che determinerebbero un cambiamento epocale per l’ambiente (come la lotta all’industria...)? Quanto carico scompare in mare? E se galleggia, come e dove viaggerà? Che tipo di eventi meteorologici si verificano sott'acqua e quanto li comprendiamo?
In un libro che funziona come un diario di viaggio, oltre che come un viaggio di scoperta e una sorta di indagine filosofica, Hohn inizia prendendo una serie di traghetti pubblici da Washington all'Alaska, commentando gli alti e bassi di quel viaggio. Quando, invece, comincia la caccia vera e propria alle paperelle di plastica Hohn si scontra con le personalità più disparate: un uomo che si considera al servizio di Madre Natura stessa; altri orgogliosi della propria missione, anche se in parte sponsorizzate da entità ostili all'ambiente come Princess Cruises e British Petroleum, che usano espedienti di facciata per uscirne “puliti” agli occhi dei consumatori; altri ancora apparentemente inconsapevoli del proprio ruolo di inquinatori nel mondo…
Ci sono digressioni sulla chimica delle tossine "adsorbite" (una bella parola che significa attaccarsi all'esterno, piuttosto che essere risucchiate e assorbite all'interno) dalla plastica pelagica e, in modo allarmante, il modo in cui si bio-accumulano quando passano attraverso la catena alimentare. Si ritrova a conoscere i diversi tipi di ghiaccio marino, l’alimentazione tipica degli albatri e la storia e la pratica dell'oceanografia. Dove Moby Dick è plasmato dall'ossessione, Moby Duck è plasmato dalla curiosità.
Si parla, ovviamente, della plastica presente nel mare. Parte di questa plastica viene depositata a tonnellate su spiagge remote, tanta altra non arriva mai a toccare terra; vaste correnti come il vortice subtropicale del Pacifico settentrionale turbinano in circolo, così tanto da formare all’interno dei centri pacifici, delle zone di convergenza, dove si accumula materiale galleggiante. Sono questi ultimi “depositi” che formano il Great Pacific Garbage Patch, una distesa di migliaia di miglia di bottiglie d'acqua di plastica, vecchie scarpe da ginnastica, televisori, materiali da imballaggio e tanto altro nei più disparati gradi di disintegrazione. La plastica, scrive Hohn, è «destinata a essere gettata via, ma chimicamente è stata progettata per durare. Offrendo la falsa promessa dell'usa e getta, del consumo a costo zero, ha contribuito a creare una cultura di spreco immaginario, un'economia dell'oblio».
May 9, 2011
Reading Moby Duck is an adventure worth taking, but not without its hazards. Like the journey of the lost bath toys, this book took me through channels more complex than I anticipated. I want to fault Hohn for taking sidetrips onto uncharted shores, and I want to accuse him of leaving the reader in the doldrums of the open sea. However, I can't criticize him for taking such a broad scope at times and for exploring minutea at others. Much of the charm of this book occurs when he describes a person, a piece of plastic, a landscape, a nautical instrument or a scientific finding--no matter how tangential-- in such incredible detail.
I expected to learn a little about plastics and currents, but I didn't expect to met so many fascinating individuals. From beachcombers, to toy sales people to sea captains to oceanographers, Hohn introduces us to a number of extraordinary people whom he encounters as he traces these bath toys' journey from where they were manufactured to where they were found ashore. (Although he does not take this trip in the same order as the ducks, beavers, frogs and turtles.) Even though he paints many as eccentric, Hohn depicts them with affection and humanity. These are people who have great passion and intelligence for their work--whether its charting undersea weather in the Carribean or analyzing the plastic sands of the western shores of the Hawaiian islands.
Hohn himself is one of the odd ducks depicted in the book. Part hero, part coward, Hohn dissolves into a Woody-Allenesque neurotic mess before launching on each leg of his trip, only to transform himself into Indiana Jones by actually participating in a few adventures on sea and ashore. Many of us go through similar vascillations daily, so the readers will relate to his inner turmoils about traveling, exploring and investigating. He really lays bare how much work and sacrifice went into writing this book, but he does so in a way that solicits my admiration. He's rarely whiney--well, at least not without justification.
Although I had to alternate reading this book with three others that were shorter and more approachable, I found that reading about 50 pages a day was enough to captivate me without capsizing me. Bon Voyage, fellow readers.
I expected to learn a little about plastics and currents, but I didn't expect to met so many fascinating individuals. From beachcombers, to toy sales people to sea captains to oceanographers, Hohn introduces us to a number of extraordinary people whom he encounters as he traces these bath toys' journey from where they were manufactured to where they were found ashore. (Although he does not take this trip in the same order as the ducks, beavers, frogs and turtles.) Even though he paints many as eccentric, Hohn depicts them with affection and humanity. These are people who have great passion and intelligence for their work--whether its charting undersea weather in the Carribean or analyzing the plastic sands of the western shores of the Hawaiian islands.
Hohn himself is one of the odd ducks depicted in the book. Part hero, part coward, Hohn dissolves into a Woody-Allenesque neurotic mess before launching on each leg of his trip, only to transform himself into Indiana Jones by actually participating in a few adventures on sea and ashore. Many of us go through similar vascillations daily, so the readers will relate to his inner turmoils about traveling, exploring and investigating. He really lays bare how much work and sacrifice went into writing this book, but he does so in a way that solicits my admiration. He's rarely whiney--well, at least not without justification.
Although I had to alternate reading this book with three others that were shorter and more approachable, I found that reading about 50 pages a day was enough to captivate me without capsizing me. Bon Voyage, fellow readers.
December 10, 2012
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn proved to be a disappointing book. I had high hopes for the book as it received quite a few positive reviews both on Goodreads and in the book press in general. Unfortunately I could not get past the self-revelatory clap – trap that the author seemed hell bent on sharing whether it was relevant or not. I simply do not care that he is afraid of seemingly everything and is continually worried about growing up. While I had hoped to learn more about how the ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs came to their fate what I found myself focused on, and distracted by, was the author’s whining. As I struggled to make myself focus on this book it became increasingly difficult (at least for me) to tell if this work was intended to be an environmental study, a polemic on consumerism and waste, or one of those now sadly popular “my year as a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ memoir.” To give Hohn his due he does have a knack for the pithy phrase but that was hardly enough to salvage this work from what I found to be an unfocused morass not unlike the gyre of trash rotating about in the Pacific Ocean that Hoan went off to find.
May 12, 2024
One of the few books where I would actively have liked to see some photographs, but there aren't any. Also one where you really want to read the endnotes, which in most cases are complete extra stories excised from the narrative in the aid of coherence!
This is an example of the type of popular science book where a complex scientific message is delivered in the midst of a chatty narrative about the author's personal quest; it doesn't always work, as in Germaine Greer's White Beech: The Rainforest Years, but in this case the author as wide-eyed innocent serves as a good guide to tie together all the varied disciplines that are covered under the umbrella of the search for 'the Floatees'. The overall message is fairly apocalyptic, from plastic pollution to vanishing of the Arctic ice (ironically enough, the ice-breaker on board which he is travelling nearly gets stuck because the ice in which they are trapped is too soft to be shattered as it was designed to do), and I note that the book is now about fifteen years old and can't help wondering how much the various scenes described here have changed since :-(
This is an example of the type of popular science book where a complex scientific message is delivered in the midst of a chatty narrative about the author's personal quest; it doesn't always work, as in Germaine Greer's White Beech: The Rainforest Years, but in this case the author as wide-eyed innocent serves as a good guide to tie together all the varied disciplines that are covered under the umbrella of the search for 'the Floatees'. The overall message is fairly apocalyptic, from plastic pollution to vanishing of the Arctic ice (ironically enough, the ice-breaker on board which he is travelling nearly gets stuck because the ice in which they are trapped is too soft to be shattered as it was designed to do), and I note that the book is now about fifteen years old and can't help wondering how much the various scenes described here have changed since :-(
April 3, 2011
So unbelievably disappointed. First of all, the title is super-misleading. The lost bath toys are just an opening for the author to go off on a hare-brained adventure that is loosely related to the bath toys but has more to do with the author's curiousity about EVERYthing. (Kind of like the pre-schooler who repeatedly asks, "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" and so on...) Not that that in and of itself is a bad thing; that premise COULD have led to a great story... but it just missed. This book had so much potential, but the author just kept getting in the way. He goes off on random tangents without really explining what they have to do with anything; particularly the tangents about his feelings and Moby Dick. (You get even more randomness if you read the endnotes, which aren't as much endnotes as random observations. I can only assume the book editor wanted him to cut some of the fluff and he wasn't able to part with it: thus, endnotes.) At no point does he tell me why I should care about how the sea makes him feel. Perhaps I am being a little harsh here, but he just irritated me. Maybe I would have cared a bit more about his emotional state if he hadn't been so self-absorbed and self-serving (for example: when he laments forgetting to bring his plastic duck with him because he wants to hurl it in the sea, even after spending the preceeding 200+ pages discussing the horrible presence of excessive plastic in the ocean!). And the writing! The author is an English teacher (a fact he crams down your throat with constant references to works of literature); and you would think, as someone who is teaching others how to write, he should be able to write coherently. You would be wrong. This book took FOREVER to slog through. Not because the topic was boring, or even because the narrator was annoying; no, it took forever because of run-on sentences! And, as you may have guessed by this review, I am a fan of commas, asides, perentheses, ellipses, semi-colons, etc. But this guy took it to a whole new level. I had to re-read more than half the sentences in this book because I forgot the point he was making by the time I got to the end of the sentence. We're talking 70+ word sentences. (Yes, I counted.) Whole paragraphs comprised of single sentences. Granted, a good editor should never have allowed it, and deserves a share of the blame, but an English teacher should know better. Despite all this, I liked what the book had to say. It brought the issue of marine pollution to the fore (although did not offer any solutions, or even any hope), it opened a window (albeit a small one) onto the Chinese toy industry, and it made me aware of some very interesting facts about weather and ocean currents. Because it had some good stuff buried beneath the midden, I'll give it 2 stars. I really wish I could have given it more.
May 31, 2019
As interesting as this book was, I was disappointed because I was expecting basically a book about would be an environmental disaster - 28,800 plastic ducks and other bath animals lost at sea - turned into an unprecedented opportunity to study the ocean currents. What I got was a book about how plastics are literally everywhere where the ocean touches the land. Perhaps this beach has been kept clean by nearby businesses due to tourism and idealized sand beaches but most have become covered in TONS of stuff. Some never to be seen save at a distance due to man's inaccessibility while other beaches become the domain of obsessive beach collectors who troll for unusual items to those who feel that organizing a cleanup of tons will help preserve the pristine wilderness only to have new deposits made mere hours if not minutes later.
Hohn became obsessed with discovering where these toys went (only about 10% have been found but there are few confirmations that the discovery was from that shipment and/or where and when). He even leaves his job as a school teacher and pregnant wife to go on 6 different 'chases' over three years - Sitka, Alaska; Gore Point and Homer, Alaska; Hawaii; Hong Kong; a container ship from Pusan, South Korea to Seattle; the Labrador Sea and lastly, the Northwest Passage as far as Cambridge Bay.
It is certainly a discovery of how our oceans have been treated as a garbage dump - intentionally or unintentionally - and how the ocean currents are changing. Especially through the Arctic. Seeing the climate change through the eyes of the people that live and attempt to maintain their cultural traditions and to still thrive on the retreating Arctic ice. It's not just polar bears. Not just dolphins, seals, albatross birds and whales.
I was surprised to discover that a container lost at sea is not unusual or rare. Thousands are lost each year but there is no public release of records due to the impact of liability. Hohn actually had a hard time discovering the information about the Ever Laurel, the storm that struck and tumbled sealed containers into the ocean south of the Aleutian Islands.
In the end, the plastic that the bath toys were constructed basically fades and breaks-down into smaller pieces. Hohn kept one he discovered in his home freeze and checked on it's condition regularly. So after 15 years (when the book was published) most are likely little bits of floating debris that birds, fish and other animals within and around the oceans have ingested. That's if they haven't begun a slow descent into the ocean depths.
Interesting especially in a time where climatic change is a major discussion and concern.
BTW, the occasional misspelling were jarring. Especially when the word was used multiple times in the same paragraph - like Arctic. The editor needed to do a better job.
2019-079
Hohn became obsessed with discovering where these toys went (only about 10% have been found but there are few confirmations that the discovery was from that shipment and/or where and when). He even leaves his job as a school teacher and pregnant wife to go on 6 different 'chases' over three years - Sitka, Alaska; Gore Point and Homer, Alaska; Hawaii; Hong Kong; a container ship from Pusan, South Korea to Seattle; the Labrador Sea and lastly, the Northwest Passage as far as Cambridge Bay.
It is certainly a discovery of how our oceans have been treated as a garbage dump - intentionally or unintentionally - and how the ocean currents are changing. Especially through the Arctic. Seeing the climate change through the eyes of the people that live and attempt to maintain their cultural traditions and to still thrive on the retreating Arctic ice. It's not just polar bears. Not just dolphins, seals, albatross birds and whales.
I was surprised to discover that a container lost at sea is not unusual or rare. Thousands are lost each year but there is no public release of records due to the impact of liability. Hohn actually had a hard time discovering the information about the Ever Laurel, the storm that struck and tumbled sealed containers into the ocean south of the Aleutian Islands.
In the end, the plastic that the bath toys were constructed basically fades and breaks-down into smaller pieces. Hohn kept one he discovered in his home freeze and checked on it's condition regularly. So after 15 years (when the book was published) most are likely little bits of floating debris that birds, fish and other animals within and around the oceans have ingested. That's if they haven't begun a slow descent into the ocean depths.
Interesting especially in a time where climatic change is a major discussion and concern.
BTW, the occasional misspelling were jarring. Especially when the word was used multiple times in the same paragraph - like Arctic. The editor needed to do a better job.
2019-079
March 24, 2011
A couple weeks ago I went to a lecture by the author of Moby Duck, Donovan Hohn. I was interested in this because of a story that I remember reading a few years ago. The story was about a flotilla of 1000 ghost rubber ducks, bleached by the sun, about to invade the coast of the UK.
That story turns out to have been false, part of the growing myth surrounding the Friendly Floatees. Much like the white whale, a figment of the collective imagination.
This book tells the story, as best can be reconstructed, of these toys. They weren’t made of rubber, and the ducks only accounted for 1/4 of the toys (lost in the creating of the myths were the turtles, frogs, and beavers).
The story is incredible. In an attempt to find the full lifecycle of these toys Hohn goes up and down the Alaskan coast looking for the toys cast upon the rugged north Pacific beaches. He goes to sea, many times, including joining scientific expeditions looking at the plastic content of the Pacific, meso scale currents in the North Atlantic, and crossing the North West Passage (now possible due to a rise of 5 degrees C at the poles) all exploring the possible tracks these toys could have taken. He even goes to China to find the birth place of these toys, and crosses the Pacific on a container ship not unlike the one the Floatees fell off of.
His style is very much like that of Bill Bryson, though his mind drifts and wanders in a really interesting way that gives you a sense of the drifting and wandering of these toys at sea. It’s an incredible lens to look at our Oceans, a largely unexplored part of our earth, the impact we are having on them, as well as the dangers that still lie out to sea.
Highly recommended.
That story turns out to have been false, part of the growing myth surrounding the Friendly Floatees. Much like the white whale, a figment of the collective imagination.
This book tells the story, as best can be reconstructed, of these toys. They weren’t made of rubber, and the ducks only accounted for 1/4 of the toys (lost in the creating of the myths were the turtles, frogs, and beavers).
The story is incredible. In an attempt to find the full lifecycle of these toys Hohn goes up and down the Alaskan coast looking for the toys cast upon the rugged north Pacific beaches. He goes to sea, many times, including joining scientific expeditions looking at the plastic content of the Pacific, meso scale currents in the North Atlantic, and crossing the North West Passage (now possible due to a rise of 5 degrees C at the poles) all exploring the possible tracks these toys could have taken. He even goes to China to find the birth place of these toys, and crosses the Pacific on a container ship not unlike the one the Floatees fell off of.
His style is very much like that of Bill Bryson, though his mind drifts and wanders in a really interesting way that gives you a sense of the drifting and wandering of these toys at sea. It’s an incredible lens to look at our Oceans, a largely unexplored part of our earth, the impact we are having on them, as well as the dangers that still lie out to sea.
Highly recommended.
May 30, 2011
I was sorely disappointed in this meandering book. I almost had to add it to my "Didn't Finish Reading" shelf, but every so often my interest was well-captured. The premise is great: Donovan Hohn heard about the container ship that spilled its contents, included 28,800 bath toys that started to wash up on shores in Alaska, and perhaps in Maine. He sets out to investigate and winds up on a journey of several years. He travels to Alaska, and joins in major beach cleanup projects, finding one of the legendary bath toys. Trying to trace the path of the toys, he goes to China to visit the toy factory from whence the toys came, and he travels on a container ship along the path of the ill-fated ship. But his quest doesn't stop there. He continues his quest on several scientific research vessels in the Atlantic, and ends his journey by traveling through the Northwest Passage on a Canadian icebreaker. He is never able to prove the legend of the "rubber ducks" (actually plastic), but along the way he shares a wealth of scientific research. He covers ocean currents, ocean pollution, the chemistry of plastic, meteorology, and the formation of Arctic ice. I got bored in many places in the book, having to go back to re-read or skimming over dense scientific explanation. It would have been very helpful to include some visual references - maps of the Alaska coastline for example, and a map of the Pacific Gyres. (I pulled out a science book from school for that). I think the book would have benefitted from some serious rewriting. I found the book most interesting during his description of his beachcombing days in Alaska and his trip on the container ship. I also enjoyed reading about some of the researchers he met, especially Amy Bower, the blind oceanographer.
July 15, 2014
a really great natural history of oceanography, shipping and commerce, climate change, freak waves, ocean currents, the writing and research process, the HUGE ASS plastic pollution problem (and how THAT is just a tiny bit of the OTHER pollution problems we are making in the seas, as well as air and land),... and on and on. This book is a bit of a master class in all things ocean. This one along with "Flotsaemtrics" and "The Wave" (author Casey wrote "White Teeth" too about the great whites off of Bolinas) will get you the smartest-person-on-your-block award if read concurrently, either that or you're a freak.
Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
March 29, 2016
Boring. And I don't like the way he describes people.
June 28, 2019
So it was extremely interesting? Absurdly long? Highly wordy? (My little bro told me the title is 100% something I'd come up with, so obviously Hohn and I think on the same wavelength and fall into the same writing pitfalls.) Honestly, I was just worn out by the time I got to the end. So many wordsssss, and this isn't even Moby-Dick. Anyhoo, I have once again resisted shelving this as i-ship and thus deserve another medal. Thankee all.
July 25, 2013
I wanted to like this book. And sometimes I did. I enjoyed learning about the plastic toy factory in China, for example, and I enjoyed reading about the ways container ships can encounter dangerous wave patterns, and how many things are lost at sea as a result; I enjoyed learning a bit about Inuit children staying up all night unsupervised in Alaska so their parents can work during the day(!).
I didn't always enjoy the 305,017 other details the author felt the need to research and share (and I say this as a scholar!). I think the author was failed by his editor--there is far more here than needs to be for the story of the ducks, or of environmental woes of plastics, or of shipping, and there are several other stories embedded within this book that would have made more compelling books on their own rather than as elements of the duck chase. In the end, it all feels a bit random--several travel stories (some of which make great little vignettes on their own) linked together by a quest to follow the ducks, the author's utterly insatiable curiosity--which I'm sympathetic to, but only to a point--but little else.
When he started talking about his son's banana, and putting the peel in a plastic bag, and sealing it, I started to lose my mind a little. At points like that I started skimming, I'll admit--but I generally picked it back up again and got involved. Overall, the sentences are lovely, the research interesting, but as a book it doesn't quite hold together for me. There's a bit of a trees/forest problem.
I didn't always enjoy the 305,017 other details the author felt the need to research and share (and I say this as a scholar!). I think the author was failed by his editor--there is far more here than needs to be for the story of the ducks, or of environmental woes of plastics, or of shipping, and there are several other stories embedded within this book that would have made more compelling books on their own rather than as elements of the duck chase. In the end, it all feels a bit random--several travel stories (some of which make great little vignettes on their own) linked together by a quest to follow the ducks, the author's utterly insatiable curiosity--which I'm sympathetic to, but only to a point--but little else.
When he started talking about his son's banana, and putting the peel in a plastic bag, and sealing it, I started to lose my mind a little. At points like that I started skimming, I'll admit--but I generally picked it back up again and got involved. Overall, the sentences are lovely, the research interesting, but as a book it doesn't quite hold together for me. There's a bit of a trees/forest problem.
April 8, 2019
I loved this so much! A great book about plastic pollution. To be honest, the cover drew me in big time. Learned a lot from the story.
Some parts are a little drawn out though. The book has a lot of pages, but some chapters are too abstract and don't add anything to the message in my opinion.
Some parts are a little drawn out though. The book has a lot of pages, but some chapters are too abstract and don't add anything to the message in my opinion.
August 18, 2014
Moby Duck is hard to describe: part travelogue, part scientific and environmental reporting, part meditation on modern consumerism, and part journal of self-discovery and adventurism. In 1992, a container ship accident dumped over 28,000 rubber toys into the Pacific Ocean, and for years after, they washed up around the Pacific Basin and some even claimed they had floated over the Arctic into the Atlantic.This saga captures the imagination of writer Donovan Hohn, who embarks on a multiyear and transglobal investigation of the origin and fate of the ducks. He travels to one of the most secluded beaches of Alaska and joins a colorful crew of beach coming and cleaning ecowarriors. He visits plastic toy factories in the heart of industrial China. He retraces the ill-fated voyage of the trans-Pacific container ship by riding a similar contain ship. He joins a blind marine biologist's Arctic explorations on an ice-cutter. All the while, he provides fascinating information about how tides work (who knew there are underwater storms called mesoscale eddies); how boats move (in six degrees of freedom: roll, pitch, yaw, heave, sway, and surge); the fate of plastics in the oceans (they never go away, just break up into ever smaller pieces); and ruminations on what it means to be a modern consumer of disposable things. He pieces together the puzzle of the ducks and concludes they never made it to the Atlantic Ocean, but like his own experiences, the fun in reading the book is in the moments of discovery, serendipity, and insights.
February 10, 2012
I wanted to read this book because I thought it would be a fun adventure about rubber duckies lost at sea and the people who tried to find them again. No such luck! It was a very long read mostly about pollution (which is a serious thing, I grant you) and the people and organizations trying to stop it.
It was way too detailed when it came to names, dates and somewhat irrelevant connections between people. He jumps about in the timeline in a very confusing way sometimes and when giving examples or making comparisons, often come up with 2,3 or 4 different ones where, really, 1 or 2 would do. This makes it all quite longwinded and somewhat boring for a person with no mind for remenbering dates and names of people who are not instrumental to the story.
I thought it would be more of a cohesive story but it seemed quite disconnected to me and there was some pretty random philosophical thoughts about childhood, the sea and all sorts of other things, that in my opinion didn't really matter for the story at hand.
It was way too detailed when it came to names, dates and somewhat irrelevant connections between people. He jumps about in the timeline in a very confusing way sometimes and when giving examples or making comparisons, often come up with 2,3 or 4 different ones where, really, 1 or 2 would do. This makes it all quite longwinded and somewhat boring for a person with no mind for remenbering dates and names of people who are not instrumental to the story.
I thought it would be more of a cohesive story but it seemed quite disconnected to me and there was some pretty random philosophical thoughts about childhood, the sea and all sorts of other things, that in my opinion didn't really matter for the story at hand.
July 21, 2011
Did not finish.
I kept expecting to learn something, but gave up. This book was obviously sold on concept and the real concept was to give the author the chance to take adventure vacations paid for by grants and an advance.
The author, who is obviously one of the privileged (no one else can afford to teach at the kind of NYC private school he taught at) pretends to be poor, which is offensive, and his reporting on other people is permeated with conceit he seems unaware of. He lost me completely when, after boring us with his health and details we don't really need to know about his family life, he expresses his horror at finding himself in the company, on a container ship, of a retired couple whose only sin appears to be that they aren't as hip as he is. They certainly couldn't have been more boring.
I kept expecting to learn something, but gave up. This book was obviously sold on concept and the real concept was to give the author the chance to take adventure vacations paid for by grants and an advance.
The author, who is obviously one of the privileged (no one else can afford to teach at the kind of NYC private school he taught at) pretends to be poor, which is offensive, and his reporting on other people is permeated with conceit he seems unaware of. He lost me completely when, after boring us with his health and details we don't really need to know about his family life, he expresses his horror at finding himself in the company, on a container ship, of a retired couple whose only sin appears to be that they aren't as hip as he is. They certainly couldn't have been more boring.
October 1, 2014
Hohn writes beautifully. Let me get that right up front. Many of his passages are lyrical and evocative. I just wish that those bits had been more liberally sprinkled in the vast sea of this (pretty hefty) book. Inspired by a student's work, Hohn becomes obsessed with the fate of crates of bath toys that spilled into the ocean, and goes a-hunting. As he writes about his travels, he refers often to Moby Dick, and uses that theme and his experiences to delve into his own thoughts and heart. The premise was interesting, and at points riveting; it just wasn't 402 pages worth of interesting. I started to flag somewhere in the middle, and only kept slogging because I hate an unfinished book.
The biggest problem is that the book leaves me thinking, "So what?" Along the journey, Hohn discusses the problem of plastics, of caring for the ocean, of caring for nature. He raises questions that he can't answer, which ought to be okay, because we are then left to answer those questions. As a result of the reading, I have started evaluating how much plastic I use in my house, and thinking about how I might reduce that type of waste on a personal level. Hohn also refers to his equivocation about fatherhood, thus attempting to set a framework for his personal journey.
It is in the combining of a personal journey, a scientific record, and an examination of culture that the book ultimately fails. Rather than choosing one angle from which to approach the topic, the author has chosen three or more, and in straddling all those streams he leaves them unsatisfactorily unexplored. It is neither deep enough to move one's heart, nor engaged enough to pique one's brain, nor light enough to slip into one's smile. It is too much of not enough.
The biggest problem is that the book leaves me thinking, "So what?" Along the journey, Hohn discusses the problem of plastics, of caring for the ocean, of caring for nature. He raises questions that he can't answer, which ought to be okay, because we are then left to answer those questions. As a result of the reading, I have started evaluating how much plastic I use in my house, and thinking about how I might reduce that type of waste on a personal level. Hohn also refers to his equivocation about fatherhood, thus attempting to set a framework for his personal journey.
It is in the combining of a personal journey, a scientific record, and an examination of culture that the book ultimately fails. Rather than choosing one angle from which to approach the topic, the author has chosen three or more, and in straddling all those streams he leaves them unsatisfactorily unexplored. It is neither deep enough to move one's heart, nor engaged enough to pique one's brain, nor light enough to slip into one's smile. It is too much of not enough.
March 19, 2019
Here's the thing: I wanted to love this book. I really did. It has a fascinating premise-chasing thousands of spilled rubber ducks across oceans and through currents, from their birth to their demise, while investigating plastic pollution, global warming, and the likes. Alas, by around halfway through the book I was ready to be done with it.
Here were my main problems with it:
1. It's too fragmented. Each adventure makes sense on their own, but there's little effort to connect them into a cohesive story.
2. I just don't understand the goal of the book. There's no clear conclusion; no point that Hohn is working towards. Just a series of meandering "chases" across the word (which, to be clear, I enjoyed reading about! However, I think Hohn would do better as a travel/short article writer than for a whole book.)
3. I just couldn't get over the fact that Hohn decided to seize a chance to go to Alaska for this book, over staying at home with his pregnant wife who could potentially give birth at any time. There are just lines you shouldn't cross. Traveling thousands of miles away to a remote place only accessible by boat while leaving your heavily pregnant wife home alone is one of them.
While I did enjoy each individual segment of the book, they needed to be more connected. And honestly, I still don't get the end-goal of the book. Oops?
Here were my main problems with it:
1. It's too fragmented. Each adventure makes sense on their own, but there's little effort to connect them into a cohesive story.
2. I just don't understand the goal of the book. There's no clear conclusion; no point that Hohn is working towards. Just a series of meandering "chases" across the word (which, to be clear, I enjoyed reading about! However, I think Hohn would do better as a travel/short article writer than for a whole book.)
3. I just couldn't get over the fact that Hohn decided to seize a chance to go to Alaska for this book, over staying at home with his pregnant wife who could potentially give birth at any time. There are just lines you shouldn't cross. Traveling thousands of miles away to a remote place only accessible by boat while leaving your heavily pregnant wife home alone is one of them.
While I did enjoy each individual segment of the book, they needed to be more connected. And honestly, I still don't get the end-goal of the book. Oops?
December 27, 2011
This book meandered from topic to topic, but maybe it was a metaphor for the way the ducks wandered through the oceans? If you look at this as the story of the ducks, which the title begs you to do, you might find yourself bored or just lost among the waves of information flowing your way. But if you look at the ducks as a gateway to information on ecology, oceanography, pollution, childhood and children's literature, the ocean-bound shipping industry, toy manufacturing, and the economy, then you'll have smooth sailing.
One question though--why do the guys who decide to write books like this have families and small children? I guess I can only think of A.J. Jacobs (Year of Living Biblically, etc.) as another example, but it stands out. This guy goes off on voyages, risking his life for a mildly interesting story, while his pregnant wife is at home. It smacks of immaturity (escaping from life's new realities) and privilege (all this travel and investigation takes money) and I find it slightly distasteful. But then, what do I know?
One question though--why do the guys who decide to write books like this have families and small children? I guess I can only think of A.J. Jacobs (Year of Living Biblically, etc.) as another example, but it stands out. This guy goes off on voyages, risking his life for a mildly interesting story, while his pregnant wife is at home. It smacks of immaturity (escaping from life's new realities) and privilege (all this travel and investigation takes money) and I find it slightly distasteful. But then, what do I know?
July 28, 2015
I have to admit, I couldn't get past page 60 in this book. I found the author unappealing, and he spent too little time on the subject at hand and too much talk talking about himself and his own (uninteresting) reflections. I reached a point where I just couldn't bring myself to read anymore.
He talks about feeling trapped and that his life is no longer his own after seeing his child's ultrasound. He then proceeds to take off on a bit of a fool's errand just before his wife's due, and from what I gather, he continued to spend the next little while as far away from his wife and kid as possible, which didn't really endear him to me. Perhaps he should have spent a little more time with his family and a little less with rubber duckies. Although, I doubt he'd agree, as he seems very self-satisfied.
He talks about feeling trapped and that his life is no longer his own after seeing his child's ultrasound. He then proceeds to take off on a bit of a fool's errand just before his wife's due, and from what I gather, he continued to spend the next little while as far away from his wife and kid as possible, which didn't really endear him to me. Perhaps he should have spent a little more time with his family and a little less with rubber duckies. Although, I doubt he'd agree, as he seems very self-satisfied.
May 14, 2018
Donovan Hohn has a unique writing style. It often seemed like he would have one thought completely unrelated to the next and then go on a very long rant connecting the two by a tiny thread. I honestly think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I had not been reading it for school and had been able to take my time with it. This is one of those books that you just can't read fast. I'll have to try it again another time.
January 13, 2020
This book should be fascinating, informative and fun. Instead the writing and language makes it unreadable. The author should have stuck to teaching. He has never met an adjective or adverb he didn't like. After 50 pages I had to stop and remind myself what the subject of the book is because of the too many asides. Where is his editor?
August 15, 2014
Couldn't finish it. An interesting topic obscured by an author much more concerned with telling you about himself than about the topic, combined with overwrought prose reeking of thesaurus abuse. When he characterized his newborn son as "meconium-besmirched," that was it for me.
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