Susan Casey: "Voices in the Ocean"

From Susan Casey, the New York Times bestselling author of The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth, a breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins.
Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seem like an aquatic mirror of mankind. In recent decades, we have learned that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, grieve, adorn themselves, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, form cliques, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don’t completely understand their sophisticated navigation and communication abilities, or their immensely complicated brains.
While swimming off the coast of Maui, Susan Casey was surrounded by a pod of spinner dolphins: a profound experience inspired her to embark on a two-year adventure exploring the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship with humanity. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment. In Ireland, a dolphin named as the world’s most loyal animal has delighted tourists and locals for decades. And Casey consults leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.
Yet Casey also examines the dark side of our relationship with dolphins, these stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry—whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured, shipped, and kept in brutal conditions. Casey’s takes her to the harrowing epicenter of the trade in the Solomon Islands, and to the Japanese town of Taiji, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, where she chronicles the annual slaughter and sale of dolphins. Finally on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document great Minoan civilization, Casey examines the harmony of a culture living in enlightened coexistence with the natural world.
Susan Casey’s combination of personal reporting, intense scientific research, and evocative prose made The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth contemporary classics of writing about the sea. She is the former editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine, and a National Magazine Award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Outside, and National Geographic.