Eric Jay Dolin
Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
Eric Jay Dolin joins us to discuss the history of one of America’s earliest industries: Whaling.
Dolin enumerates several sites to learn more about the history of whaling including the Nantucket Whaling Museum, New Bedford Whaling Museum, The Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum, Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, and Mystic Seaport Museum which has the Charles W. Morgan, the only remaining wooden whaling ship in the world. You can also watch an excellent gallery talk with New Bedford Whaling Museum curator Akeia Benard, PhD.
[Recorded May 14, 2020.]
Eric Jay Dolin, PhD, is the author of fourteen books. His most recent is A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes, which received a number of accolades, including being chosen by the Washington Post as one of 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020, by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 (in addition to being a Kirkus Prize finalist), by the Library Journal and Booklist as one of the Best Science & Technology Books of 2020, and by the New York Times Book Review as an “Editor’s Choice.” Other books include Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; and Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates, which was chosen as a “Must-Read” book for 2019 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston Author’s Club. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.