Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks

In the deeply mysterious ocean, no this darkness, and shows how corner is more shadowy to us than the unknown, uncharted realm of the shark. And as with all shadows, we’re afraid of what lurks in them. Juliet Eilperin’s beautifully evocative Demon Fish lights up fearing sharks rather than understanding them has cost us more than we know. (It’s cost the sharks even more: Though we’ve never been able to pinpoint how many of them live in our planet’s waters, we do know that their populations are plunging, possibly even into decimation territory, largely at our hands.)

For my money the best, page-turning narratives are immersive ones, and Eilperin excels at this. Readers will enjoy traveling with her as she ventures from Indonesia to Japan to Africa to North America in dauntless pursuit of answers to questions that few writers have asked: Why do we approach sharks with such runaway emotion? Why do we fear these fish sometimes, and revere them others? What’s really going on with these animals, beneath the ocean’s surface? And of course the big one: after surviving all five global mass extinctions, can sharks make it through another decade of co-existing with us?

--Susan Casey