Rating: 
Summary: Hunting: From the swamp to the sea
Review: Sullivan's first book, The Meadowlands was a masterpiece. What I enjoyed most were his chats with and observations of people. Now, we have his latest effort (though his prose style seems effortless) and it is chuck full of people...people you get to know very well as you read this page turner. We can hope that Sullivan's next adventure introduces us to more interesting folks. It will be difficult for him, however, to sustain the drama that envelops A Whale Hunt. BC, Tucson AZ
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring, fascinating
Review: This is an inspiring, funny, interesting, quirky, and quietly heroic story, very well told. Even without the climactic, unifying event, it would be a fascinating study of a community and its people.I think the reviewer Doc Rosen, below, is wrong when he says that Sullivan accepted the "lies" of Paul Watson, the anti-whale-hunt captain of the Sea Shepherd. It seemed to me that Sullivan's portrayal of Watson as a bombastic fraud was quite effective, although never explicit, and that he merely passed along, skeptically, what Watson told him, and then left it to the reader to accept or reject. I, for one, did not believe Watson for a minute, and I am grateful to Rosen for the confirmation. I can do no better than to second Karen Rudolph's review, below. I only wish Sullivan could have provided portraits of more of the people involved (e.g., more crew members).
Rating: 
Summary: The Makah and the Whale
Review: This is an interesting book, and Sullivan does his best to present pro-hunt and anti-hunt views objectively (though I agree his sympathies lie with the Makah, as mine did). However, the book needed a stronger editor: 1. The book is a bit rambling, as if it were written largely verbatim from notes or a journal, and he couldn't bear not to use any of them; we just don't need to know the minutia like the fact that Sullivan put his daughter's car seat in the trunk in order to give two people a ride (his daughter, his car, the car seat, etc., play *no part* in the story's narrative - this is just filler). 2. In addition to the errors mentioned in Capt. Watson's review, there are numerous others (e.g., Navajos live largely in Arizona, not New Mexico). Someone trained as a journalist knows how to research facts and thus should be more careful with them; these errors make the reader doubt the veracity of Sullivan's account. 3. A few of the Moby Dick/Melville footnotes are interesting, but mostly they are annoying. As with distracting minutia, Sullivan seems to feel that he spent all that time reading Moby Dick and then Melville biographies, so he'd better put them in the book. He reaches so far to include Melville tidbits that it becomes quite comical: Sullivan mentions one of the crew is going bowling - BAM, footnote, Melville once worked at a bowling alley!!!; Sullivan went on an outing on April Fool's Day - BAM, footnote, Melville wondered if life was a joke!!! Sullivan feels these are cosmic coincidences joining the Makah whalers and the famous novelist of whaling. Unfortunately he undercuts this side story by seeing coincidences in things as common as breathing. All that said, it's still not a bad book. It's just frustrating, because with some deft editing and reorganizing the book could have been outstanding.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent memoir of some guy I never heard of
Review: This is one of those books that I do not quite know how to rate. The book is a first person account of a outsider observing the Makah Indian hunt for a gray whale off the Olympic peninsula in Northwestern Washington state.
The book is the greatest memoir I have ever read. The book gets a little wordy, but the writing is full of vivid details. I think the author provides thoughtful insight into the whale hunt through numerous conversations and interactions with local Makah Indians. I do agree with a previous reviewer that the author's viewpoint did seem slightly biased toward the Makah, but not enough to ruin the book. Some previous reviewers commented on the accuracy of the book. To be honest, I do not know enough about the topic to note whether the author's story is inaccurate or not.
I purchased the book as I wanted to find out more about the Makah whale hunt, as I did not realize the significance of the hunt to the Northwest Indians at the time it happened. Judging by the title of the book and the previous reviews, this did not seem like a bad choice. However, while the book is an excellent memoir, in the end it is a memoir of some journalist I have never heard of. I admire the author's dedication to the story as he followed it for well over a year while other reporters only seemed to appear when they though something will happen. In the end, I really did not care if the author slept in a tent or a plywood shack and I really did not find the type of car he rented to be especially relevant. While I am sure the trip to see the gray whales in the Baja Peninsula in Mexico was a moving experience, I really did not feel it fit into the overall storyline of the book. Also, I personally found the whole Moby Dick parallel to be incredibly irritating.
The book is an excellent read, though it does get wordy at times and some of the subjects do not seem to have much relevance to the storyline. The author had a lot of interaction with the Makah Indians who were on the whaling crew. For this reason, I would recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the Makah gray whale hunt. I would also recommend the book for anyone who is interested in the modern life of Northwest coastal Indians or who are bored and just looking for some decent non-fiction to read.
Rating:
Summary: a serious page-turner
Review: What a riveting story this book tells. It's about a tribe of American Indians in the Pacific Northwest who are trying to make a comeback against great odds, trying to reconnect with an ancestral tradition that none of them has witnessed, and doing so amid a swirl of eco-controversy. I got so wrapped up in the lives of the people the author depicts, and the breathtaking land- and seascapes in which the drama unfolds, that it was only after I finished the book that I paused to reflect what a virtuoso prose stylist Robert Sullivan is. He uses a variety of rhetorical approaches to bring out the full complexity of the situation he's describing. This book is both fun and profound, if that makes sense: wistful, weird, quintessentially American.
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