Susan Casey, Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting 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, feel despondent, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, seduce, form cliques, throw tantrums, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don’t completely understand their incredibly 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. It was a profoundly transporting experience, and it inspired her to embark on a two-year global adventure to explore the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship to humanity. Casey examines the career of the controversial John Lilly, the pioneer of modern dolphin studies whose work eventually led him down some very strange paths. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment, travels to Ireland, where a dolphin named as “the world’s most loyal animal” has delighted tourists and locals for decades with his friendly antics, and consults with the world’s leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.Yet there is a dark side to our relationship with dolphins. They are the stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry, whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured violently, then shipped and kept in brutal conditions. Casey’s investigation into this cruel underground 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 in its narrow bay.Casey ends her narrative on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document the great Minoan civilization, a culture which lived in harmony with dolphins, and whose example shows the way to a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.No writer is better positioned to portray these magical creatures than Susan Casey, whose 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. In Voices in the Ocean, she has written a thrilling book about the other intelligent life on the planet.

Literary Awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science & Technology (2015)______Сьюзан Кейси, плавая вблизи берега Мауи на Гавайях, оказалась в стае дельфинов, и этот опыт настолько ее потряс, что она предприняла двухлетнее исследование природы этих животных и их сложных взаимоотношений с человечеством. Она посетила сообщество на Гавайях, верящее, что дельфины - ключ к духовному просвещению, путешествовала в Ирландию, где дельфина называют “самое верное животное в мире”, и брала интервью у ведущих морских исследователей.

Помимо этого, в книге описывается и темная сторона отношения людей к дельфинам: зловещая многомиллиардная индустрия поимки и торговли дельфинами, непременно включающая в себя их содержание в жестоких условиях.

Кейси заканчивает ее рассказ на острове Крит, где тысячелетние фрески и другие произведения искусства свидетельствуют о цивилизации, которая жила в гармонии с дельфинами, и чей пример показывает возможность сосуществования с миром природы.

Книга получила первое место в 2015 году по результатам голосования читателей на сайте Goodreads в номинации Наука и техника.