How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill
How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill
List: $27.99 | Sale: $19.59
Club: $13.99

How to Speak Whale
A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication

Author: Tom Mustill

Narrator: Tom Mustill

Unabridged: 9 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/06/2022


Synopsis

What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty‑ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak—asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication.

“When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size.”
 
On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend just off the coast of California. It was cold, but idyllic—until a humpback whale breached, landing on top of them, releasing the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. He was certain he was about to die, but they both survived, miraculously unscathed. In the interviews that followed the incident, Mustill was left with one question: What could this astonishing encounter teach us?
 
Drawing from his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker, Mustill started investigating human–whale interactions around the world when he met two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI)—originally designed to translate human languages—to discover patterns in the conversations of animals and decode them. As he embarked on a journey into animal eavesdropping technologies, where big data meets big beasts, Mustill discovered that there is a revolution taking place in biology, as the technologies developed to explore our own languages are turned to nature.
 
From seventeenth-century Dutch inventors, to the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, to the cutting edge of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale examines how scientists and start-ups around the world are decoding animal communications. Whales, with their giant mammalian brains, virtuoso voices, and long, highly social lives, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human animal interaction be?

We’re about to find out.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ula on August 31, 2022

What an adventure! Mustill uses an almost Hitchcockian narration – he starts by describing a near-death experience during whale-watching and then takes a reader on a mindblowing journey, both in geographic and intellectual terms. His curiosity, fueled by this unforgettable encounter, drives him to f......more

Goodreads review by Irene on September 16, 2022

Tom Mustill is a man after my own heart. This book is a love letter to cetaceans, to language, and to communication stripped of human exceptionalism. Our biggest downfall as a species when it comes to understanding other animals is that we feel an overwhelming need to feel we're still better, smarte......more

Goodreads review by Courtney on January 19, 2023

Very fascinating. Granted, I have biology degree and have taken several animal behaviour courses as part of my learning, so I may be bias but this book was incredibly interesting.......more

Goodreads review by Rose on January 13, 2023

EeeeOoooooooEeeeeeeee (clicking noises)* Nailed it. *Translation: Shakespeare and Company Year of Reading 2023 - January pick This felt like it was trying to do two things at once - (i) be one man's love letter to, and account of his encounters with, whales, and (ii) be an account of whale-human interac......more