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    Moby Duck
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    Moby Duck
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    Moby Duck
    Audiobook15 hours

    Moby Duck

    Written by Donovan Hohn

    Narrated by Christopher Evan Welch

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Award-winning author Donovan Hohn’s work has been featured in Harper’s and New York Times Magazine. In Moby-Duck, Hohn investigates the curious incident of thousands of rubber ducky toys lost at sea in 2005.

    “This dazzles from start to finish.”—Booklist, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateMar 3, 2011
    ISBN9781461804024
    Unavailable
    Moby Duck

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    Reviews for Moby Duck

    3.5/5

    149 ratings22 reviews

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    • 4/5
      3.75 stars for this one!

      It's a bit too long and wordy (75 pages less would be about right). But meandering as it does through culture, toymaking, weather-vs-climate, polar ice, environmentalism, ocean currents, transoceanic shipping and childrens toys, this is a fascinating look at one of those great universal stories: 28800 plastic bath toys are lost at sea during shipping between China and Seattle, and then wash up on beaches for the next couple of decades.

      It's a nicely explored book, well researched and well told. I learned a lot more than I thought I would, though there were also sections when I could loosely skim 15 or 20 pages and not care about what I missed.

      Hohn is at his best when describing people and objects; he's really witty and fun. This makes the meandering worthwhile.
    • 5/5
      To steal a phrase: Where is AWAY? Where do things go when you throw them away? And what if things fall overboard on their way to be sold on market or on their way back to be landfilled or recycled?

      This book gives a clear set of data about what has been turned into an urban legend in the retelling. I was very interested in the maps and charts that show exactly how the oceanic currents bring items to an ulimate destination over time.

      I really wish that someone with this sort of passion and commitment could win a MacArthur Grant; I can hope, fervently, that the cute title might prompt the young people who will inherit the problem as the years go on to read this book even though it is non-fiction and does not have ANY Sparkly!Vampires in it.
    • 4/5
      Hohn has written a fine book about an important environmental concern and tried to do it in an all-encompassing, funny, and interesting way. He partially succeeds. I love the all-encompassing part as I have been in many of the same parts of the world he travels to and describes. He can be moderately funny sometimes. His big fail is his ability to digress and not pull the topic together in a relevant and meaningful way. It happens consistently throughout the book and makes it a bit less interesting and, frankly, dull. I'm delighted, I guess, that he is a father, but the relevance to the book is minimal, at best, especially for the reader. He needs to keep the family story line out of the book. Had he done this effectively, the book was a five star.
    • 4/5
      Told with a blend of matter-of-fact evidence, anecdotal niceties, narrative epics, and somewhat self-effacing humor, Donovan draws for us a picture of our polluted world from the greatest garbage patches of the pacific to the smallest sphere of Styrofoam cohabiting with our sandy shores. Hahn's style of story weaving grips the reader without ensnaring them - you feel the need to continue on, but feel perfectly free to put the book down without the fear of forgetting the threads that brought you to where you are. I could have done without all his moaning and whining about leaving his family behind - it did absolutely nothing for the story, but whatever.
    • 4/5
      I remember hearing the stories about these ducks potentially washing up along the Maine coast, so when I got the chance to bring this book with me on a Maine vacation, I snatched it up, figuring it would make for good reading on a deck overlooking the water. It was. Hohn's book is an interesting and personal account of the author's quest to understand these ducks (and their floating comrades) but also to grasp the broader issues of transoceanic container shipping, the plague of plastic trash polluting the oceans, &c. Quite a bit of haring off on long tangents (probably could have stood to be a hundred pages or so shorter), but that didn't bother me too much at all in this case.
    • 3/5
      Very interesting in parts, although my overall reaction is disappointed. I found the book to be rambling more than was necessary. As if the writer was taking us on the same vague, non-linear journey that he was on. I respect that he sought after this mystery - of a load of floating toys lost overboard in the Pacific in 1992 - without much training or even planning. Without a goal or a conception of what he was looking for. I understand that. However, once he got to the end - or whenever he decided to stop - I was expecting a summation of what (at least) *he* thought it to mean. I didn't really even get that. We do get his opinion on various things as the transpire in the book. Some very environmentally scary things, some humorous stories, and long pages of drifting along - like the floating toys he is seeking. Overall - I did enjoy most of it. With some significant trimming and some kind of summation, it would have been wonderful.
    • 5/5
      This is a fascinating, well written book which combines true story, travel, science, a bit of biography and lots of literary references. The author was once a school teacher and I think this comes across, certainly in the fact that he is obviously well educated and also because of the literary references used throughout the book - I took this to be partly a nod to his previous career. The link to Moby Dick throughout is very clever, but I liked the references to Winnie the Pooh just as much!There is so much I liked about this book, I was quite sad to get to the end, although sometimes the science content was a bit tough going. What a fascinating journey the author has taken to uncover more of the story of the rubber ducks! I was horrified by the sheer scale of rubbish collected on the very rural beaches of Alaska and the descriptions of the garbage patch at sea are frankly shocking, as is the thought of degraded plastic particles potentially becoming part of our food chain. It is a book that will stay with me for a long time I think. My only regret is buying the kindle version rather than the physical book. I haven't seen the book, but I imagine the reading would be enriched with photographs - there are some on the writers website.
    • 3/5
      Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn is the Pacific Ocean's answer to Charlie Connelly's Attention All Shipping (LINK). Both start with a simple concept and turn into a mixture of travelog, memoir, and social essay.In the 1990s, a container ship was hit by a wave and dropped some of its cargo, namely 28,000 (at best count) bath toys: ducks, beavers, frogs, and turtles. The ocean managed to force open the crates. The salt water dissolved the cardboard packaging, The ocean currents did the rest.Their path took the toys into the Arctic Circle where they got trapped in the ice later began washing up on Alaskan shores. Many years later reports surfaced of sun bleached bath toys showing up on Eastern Seaboard beaches.Hohn's book started as an exploration of the currents, the trash eddies, and climatology. It morphed into a study of container shipping (and just how much stuff is probably lost overboard but left unreported). The book includes interviews of people who found the toys as well as thoughts on how the hunt for them brought people together.While interesting, I wanted more from the book. The book would have been stronger with photographs: the actual toys, the people interviewed, etc. It also needed more maps and infographics. The book is basically crying for illustrations.
    • 2/5
      On January 10, 1992, a container ship traveling south of the Aleutians took a steep roll and lost part of its cargo. The incident had near-mythical repercussions. Among the lost merchandise were 7,200 packs of bathtub toys. Each four-piece set included a blue turtle, a green frog, a red beaver and a yellow duck. In little more than 24 hours the ocean was transformed into a mighty bathtub on which bobbed 28,800 plastic toys. The migration of this vast flock bobbing on the currents of the Pacific has been monitored by environmentalists, meteorologists, and an English teacher from Manhattan named Donavan Hohn.

      There were so many interesting stories this book could have told about ocean conservation and water pollution. It could also have been a humorous hunt for the lost rubber ducks. But it didn't tell those stories. The end result was a rambling and verbose monologue with no apparent point at all.

      This is really a story about plastic in the ocean and the currents, surface and deep, that move things in the ocean. Why that was so interesting that the author decided to take off to Alaska in the last month of his wife's pregnancy where he remained out of cell phone range is something I can't explain. I was very disappointed and can't think of a single person I would recommend it to.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like this a lot more, but I felt like it wasn't cohesively written enough. I actually only got about 3/4 of the way through, then decided I'd gotten everything out of it that I could.
    • 3/5
      Moby-Duck is too long for my taste at almost 400 pages, but Hohn, a former teacher, clearly explains what we know about ocean currents and even how we know it. In addition, his descriptions of such things as swimming in deep water off Hawaii and traveling on the Alaska ferry from Bellingham to Sitka are fun to read and evocative.
    • 5/5
      Great book with lots of interesting facts about our oceans, how they were before we started messing with them, and what their future looks like. Warning, though, it's a dense read. The author has clearly done his homework and had a very lenient editor. No conversation, it appears, is left without lengthy quoting. All for the good, though, as the topic is interesting.
    • 4/5
      If you've read the Eric Carle book, 10 Little Rubber Ducks, you know the background story. A container ship of bathtub toys lost thousands of rubber ducks while crossing the Pacific. Mr. Hohn labels himself a part-time archeologist of the ordinary who became similarly fascinated with story. But rather than colorful pictures of fanciful encounters with aquatic life, Mr. Hohn explores ocean currents, beachcombers, the oceanic gyres, global warming, and the durability of plastic.The book is full of interesting information about our oceans and the stories of those ducks. By the way, it was not just ducks. The overboard packages also had a red beaver, a blue turtle, and a green frog. It's the yellow duck that captured people's imagination. That is one topic explored in the book.This book has been on my "to read" list for a long time, in part because of my enjoyment of the Carle book. However, I think I set my expectations too high. The narrative wanders a bit as Mr. Hohn travels the world exploring the back story of the ducks. At times, it seems he tries to be too clever in constructing complex sentences and flashbacks. It becomes distracting from an otherwise interesting story. It also ends flat, without a satisfying resolution to his studies.
    • 4/5
      This book is about the sea and I learned a lot about the sea from it. Hohn uses 'Moby Dick' as his model and his book has some of the benefits and many of the drawbacks of Melville's. Both works attempt a kind of maximalist approach, ranging broadly across a variety of subjects and disquisitions. The approach allows for a lot of illumination on diverse topics but it also tends to feel somewhat haphazard and brisk. Without the benefit of Melville's fictional viewpoint, Hohn has little time to stop and he is guided by a very slim plan - so his book lacks those elements that might otherwise draw the reader in - sympathy, character, plot, etc... As a didactic injection of modern marine lore, however, it is just about worth the price of the ticket. An illustrated edition could improve things somewhat.
    • 3/5
      It's an interesting proposition: can a school teacher track down the plastic toys that fell off a ship in the northern Pacific in 1992? He actually leaves his job for three years -- his wife pregnant, no less -- to take up this wild goose chase. The result is kind of an extended essay, merged with a couple high school research papers, that meanders all over. There is a stream-of-consciousness atmosphere to the book, as the author reflects on his performance as a father, the ecological impacts of plastic, how to travel cheap to strange places, the economy of China, and more. At times I found the brew fun, and at others it was just hard to get through. Overall, an uneven book that doesn't quite seem to know what it wants to do.
    • 4/5
      Moby Duck is hard to describe: part travelogue, part scientific and environmental reporting, part meditation on modern consumerism, and part journal of self-discovery and adventurism. In 1992, a container ship accident dumped over 28,000 rubber toys into the Pacific Ocean, and for years after, they washed up around the Pacific Basin and some even claimed they had floated over the Arctic into the Atlantic.This saga captures the imagination of writer Donovan Hohn, who embarks on a multiyear and transglobal investigation of the origin and fate of the ducks. He travels to one of the most secluded beaches of Alaska and joins a colorful crew of beach coming and cleaning ecowarriors. He visits plastic toy factories in the heart of industrial China. He retraces the ill-fated voyage of the trans-Pacific container ship by riding a similar contain ship. He joins a blind marine biologist's Arctic explorations on an ice-cutter. All the while, he provides fascinating information about how tides work (who knew there are underwater storms called mesoscale eddies); how boats move (in six degrees of freedom: roll, pitch, yaw, heave, sway, and surge); the fate of plastics in the oceans (they never go away, just break up into ever smaller pieces); and ruminations on what it means to be a modern consumer of disposable things. He pieces together the puzzle of the ducks and concludes they never made it to the Atlantic Ocean, but like his own experiences, the fun in reading the book is in the moments of discovery, serendipity, and insights.
    • 3/5
      In which a high school teacher is so spellbound by a student's paper describing a massive spill of thousands of bath toys that he quits his job to undertake a search for the toys. The book centers around a series of oceanographic expeditions that he hitches a ride on, with side trips to explore the factory in China where the toys were made and finagling an introduction into the curious hobby of beachcombing. The author is a very good writer who is witty and thoughtful at all the right times; however, this book ultimately succumbs to mediocrity because it is too long and, even more, because the author follows the broad and easy path which wrecks almost all nautical books: he slings seafarer jargon around with very little attempt to define or explain what the deuce he's trying to say in English. Between the yachtsman jargon and an agglomeration of chemistry terms which would send an undegraduate chemistry major to the dictionary, he erected vocabulary barriers that I really didn't feel like climbing. Even worse, after all this erudition, he then does find the time to stop and define lots of fairly common terms such as "anemometer". Huh?
    • 4/5
      An interesting, though tiring, review of almost everything which relates to those bath toys. There are a lot of anecdotes, a lot of factoids, a lot of maritime history and a continuous parade of environmental concerns.There are also some interesting comments regarding Moby Dick, the role of toys in society etc. etc.To me, at least, the whole book was a bit overwhelming and, toward the end, a real struggle to finish!
    • 3/5
      Very interesting through most of the book, until it bogged down in th Artic Circle. Published 10 years ago, most of what was being noted is still true - there are garbage patches in the oceans, there is global warming and the ocean currents are in general stable, but we're still learning about them.
    • 4/5
      A mad sort of book written after a American teacher discovers that a container spill at sea deposits 28,800 plastic bath toys at sea.

      This book documents his trail of the bath toys, and takes him to the factory that made them, a trip across the Pacific on a container ship and across the northwest passage in search of them.
    • 3/5
      Fascinating subject matter, but elaborately overwritten. The author could not resist a single artistic flourish, whether it helped tell the story or not. It meandered all over so many subjects that it became a bore.
    • 4/5
      Imagine this scenario; a massive container ship laden to the gunwales enters a storm in the north Pacific in transit from China to the US when it loses a number of containers, spilling into the sea its precious cargo, never to be seen again……or will it?And who will be the salvage experts in search for such lost treasure? Maybe cut throats, knives clenched between their teeth, brimming with determination to seek it out and lay claim to it…Nope. Not even close…A container ship did in fact take on the full fury of such a storm, in the place mentioned, and containers did spill forth into the ocean, and they did in fact open up and released their precious cargo; not anything your imagination allowed you to think though.Rubber ducks.Yellow rubber ducks, ala Ernie from Sesame St fame…in excess of 28,000 of them.And if we pull back a little, Mr Hohn is no pirate or gold-digging explorer, but a teacher who caught wind of the story some years later and decided to pack in his job, have a baby and search for the real story about the little lumps of plastic which had been washing up on distant shores, even 10 years later.And it’s all true.This is a great sea ditty (albeit not in the traditional sense) as Hohn doesn’t leave any stone unturned as he hunts his own Moby Dick, a book paid reference to many a time throughout. Cleaning beaches in Alaska, riding a container ship from Asia, even taking part of a scientific research expedition in the Arctic…Hohn is obsessed with an iconic symbol of our childhood, and while he could go buy one for a couple of bucks instore, he is hellbent on finding one amongst the jetsam and flotsam of beaches barely seen by human eyes.Now I can’t tell you the outcome, that would ruin it, but enjoy the man’s travels, through hardship and otherwise as he explains the Great Garbage Patch of the Pacific, a natural phenomenon of ocean currents that accumulates all of our junk in a floating cesspit (shame on you all!), to the vaguries of our incessant desire to consume shit that is quite frankly, bloody bad for us.And while the book has some classic passages of light relief and is up tempo, there is a dark, underlying theme that we only get one shot at this place, and we’re screwing it up royally…Top read, a must for tree-huggers and heathens alike.