Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins

An Amazon Best Book of August 2015: Susan Casey’s Voices in the Ocean opens with a near perfect set piece about a swim she once took in Maui. Her father had died two years prior, and she was still struggling with her feelings over the loss. Casey wades out at dusk for a solo ocean swim. The weather is bad and sharks have recently been seen in the area—but, Casey writes, “a strange thing happens when your worst nightmare is realized: nothing much is left to scare you.” Rather than something bad happening to her, she suddenly finds herself, mid-swim, surrounded by spinner dolphins. It is one of those rare moments of real awe, and the experience launches her book and, more importantly, her fascination with dolphins, which leads Casey on a globe-trotting trek around the world to study dolphins, porpoises, and whales. She begins by contacting a woman named Ocean, a New Age believer in the power of the dolphin; in Casey’s words, Ocean entertains “Star Trekian views about dolphins acting as teachers and visionaries and emissaries from other dimensions.” From there Casey expands her research to cover pioneering dolphin studies, human-dolphin encounters, dolphin and whale hunting (which still happens), and the cultural significance of dolphins going back centuries. While Casey touches on a variety of subjects, including dolphin behavior and science (they work together, experience joy, show real purpose and a sense of self), readers will note that she doesn’t shrink from the woo-woo (occasionally bordering on Star Trekian New Age) views that Ocean and others in the book support about dolphins. But this can be read as a positive. Casey loves her subject, and we all know there is something special about dolphins, even if we non-experts aren’t quite sure what it is. – Chris Schluep