edited by Greg Gatenby
Few animals have been more admired than the whale, which is just as well, since it needs every friend it can get. Poet Gatenby has gathered an anthology of expressions of that admiration throughout history, in literature, art and music, and it makes for a stately, absorbing book. Gatenby takes some aquatic license and includes works that refer to dolphins and porpoises, but that seems reasonable. As Ogden Nash wrote, "I kind of like the playful porpoise/A healthy mind in a healthy corpus/He and his cousin, the playful dolphin/Why they like swimmin like I like golphin." (Little, Brown, $39.95; royalties go to the Greenpeace Foundation's Save the Whales campaign)
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