Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals

Few zoologists have expressed their enthusiasm for their work more charmingly than Collet in this loosely organized collection of personal essays. Founder and director of the Marine Mammal Research Institute in La Rochelle, France, Collet is a leading expert on cetaceans (the order of mammals that includes baleen and tooth whales, dolphins and several other creatures) and a passionate foe of the pollution and overfishing that is threatening the health of the world's oceans. In the latest addition to Milkweed's World as a Home series of literary testaments to living in harmony with nature, she describes the thrill and the occasional frustration of searching for whales; the awe of encountering them; the sometimes comic, sometimes terrifying snafus that can arise on ocean expeditions. She also describes her love for the rich marine ecosystem that is increasingly imperiled by human activities she insists can and must be changed. Collet sprinkles her essays with fascinating facts about cetacean biology (among them, that whales evolved from land animals resembling large hoofed wolves) and includes a helpful species list and glossary, but the book's nonchronological organization and personal approach make it less effective as a reference than as an inspirational work. Collet's first piece, especially, in which she explains how she discovered her vocation despite several false starts and a formidable struggle with academics, will convince young readers, particularly girls, that they can achieve similar goals--and that makes this title a good bet to succeed as a gift item aimed at the young women in bookbuyers' lives. (Nov.)