Our book today lands squarely in the category I’ve come to call “Near Misses”: it’s The Urban Whale: North Atlantic Right Whales at the Crossroads, edited by Scott Kraus and Rosalind Rolland, and it’s a “Near Miss” because it was brought out by Harvard University Press in February of 2007 – mere weeks before my beloved Open Letters Monthly made its debut on the lit-journal scene, and hence mere weeks before its doors opened to the arrival of review copies from publishers.

Of course, the earliest months of any new journal are always the diciest times to request books from anybody; not only have you yet to secure a sizable audience (unless you’re one of those new lit journals that debuts to widespread acclaim – a truly bizarre phenomenon that nevertheless does occasionally happen), but more importantly, you’ve yet to prove that you know what you’re doing, in terms of reviewing books. By the time Open Letters debuted in March of 2007, almost all of the contacts I myself had made in the publishing world had retired or gone to that big deadline in the sky (with one rather hefty exception, where virtue was rewarded with the top office) – so OLM was forced to start from scratch in terms of getting review copies from publishers.

Even so, I’d certainly have tried for The Urban Whale. It’s a 500-page anthology of 17 scientific papers dealing with many aspects of North Atlantic right whale biology, behavior, and conservation, written by 35 of the leading scientists who study these magnificent creatures for a living – in other words, a mouth-watering example of a “Steve book” if ever there was one. I’d have requested it from the good folks at Harvard University Press, and I’d have hoped for it in the mail. As things happened, I got a copy from a friend who snatched it from the giveaway shelf of an already-established lit journal.

I love the book, and had I received it in the mail for review, I’d have been all fired up to communicate my enthusiasm about it to people who’d otherwise hear “500-page collection of scientific articles about right whales” and walked off in the opposite direction.

I’d have had a great deal of material to work with, in this case. Yes, the tone of most of these articles is fairly dry and academic (with certain exceptions, most notably the chapter called “Enormous Carnivores, Microscopic Food, and a Restaurant That’s Hard to Find” by Mark Baumgartner, Charles Mayo, and Robert Kenney), but the scope of this anthology covers so many different fascinating aspects of the northern right whale’s world that pretty much anybody even vaguely interested in whales (and who in the civilized world isn’t?) will find something to hook them and draw them in. Here we have papers on what these whales eat, where they go, how the sonarscape of their world is warped by the noise of humanity, how humanity’s ocean-going vessels and massive drag-netting presents them with constant dangers – all the very outward inquiries that are the only things we can study about a species that will always remain so utterly mysterious to humans. Right whales cover whole oceans in their travels and conduct their whole lives in worlds far, far from the surface sunlight world of their human observers. Humans will never know anything about what northern right whales think or feel toward each other; we’ll never know how they love their children; we’ll never know how they learn or what amuses them.

This book was 2007’s best summary of what science can know about the northern right whale, and it’s full of low-key nerdy wonders. I didn’t receive it in the mail back then, but I can certainly recommend it now even so.