Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

THE LAST WHALERS

Doug Bock Clark

Three Years in the Far Pacific with an Ancient Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life

The epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to the way of life that has sustained them for five centuries.

The Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,800 people on the Indonesian island of Lembata, have subsisted on whaling for at least five hundred years. In The Last Whalers, after three years of living with this tribe, writer Doug Bock Clark takes readers into their way of life, one in which their yearly haul from the sea provides both their food and their currency.

But this ancient way of life that has sustained and nourished a people unchanged for centuries is in danger of perishing from the earth forever when a port is planned next door to the village of Lamalera and encroaching technology causes divisiveness and splintering in the tribe. Clark documents it all-the Curse of the Black Goat, the Wulandoni War, the Road of Ghosts-as one form of being human, in contact with deeply elemental life rhythms, teeters on the verge of extinction.

The Last Whalers tells the unlikely and important story of a resilient group of human beings unlike any other in the world. Extreme in nature, the act of whaling is a dangerous and uncommon feat, but for the Lamalerans it is also the only way of life they have ever known. From the inside, Clark has told a story for the ages about the bravery of a people whose very culture may not survive beyond these pages.

Doug Bock Clark is a writer and photographer whose articles and pictures have been published or are forthcoming in the GQ, WIRED, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, the New York Times, Men's Journal,and Foreign Policy, among other magazines and newspapers. His work has been anthologized by Oxford University Press and supported by two Fulbright Fellowships and a Glimpse Fellowship, a grant sponsored by National Geographic. "The Bot Bubble," his cover article for The New Republic, was a finalist for a 2016 Mirror Award.

Available products
Book Published 2019-01-08 by Little Brown
Book Published 2019-01-08 by Little Brown

Comments

UK/Commonwealth: John Murray ; France: Editions du Sous-Sol ; Japan: NHK Publishing ; Korea: SOSO ; Spain: Los Libros del Asteroide

The Last Whalers is a monumental achievement. With luminous writing and expert reporting, Doug Bock Clark provides a rare view into our shared human past, from exhilarating whale hunts to intimate family dramas. In doing so, he reveals the complex lives of men and women whose ancient culture teeters between the eternal teachings of the Ancestors and the pressures and enticements of modernity.

Doug Bock Clark has delivered us an amazing account of an almost mythological fight - man versus leviathan - and in vivid prose he reveals the most profound truths about both how strong we are and how fragile we are. Part journalism, part anthropology, The Last Whalers is a spectacular and deeply empathetic attempt to understand a vanishing world. I absolutely loved this magnificent book.

Doug Bock Clark's remarkable, gorgeously written account of tribal honor, love, and sacrifice among hunter-gatherers reminds us in this age of breakneck development that the disappearance of indigenous societies diminishes us all.

Immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable...The story Clark returned with - comprised of births and deaths, terrible injuries and old rituals, furtive love affairs and intertribal rivalries - has the texture and coloring of a first-rate novel... Clark's humility gives the book an organic and resonant propulsion. Accumulated tensions are only slowly released. Scenes are delivered, not summaries. This book earns its emotions.

A fascinating debut...Accessible and empathetic...Clark creates a thoughtful look at the precariousness of cultural values and the lure of modernization in the developing world.

The Last Whalers is an intimate and moving account of cultural extinction told on a profoundly human scale, an urgent and affecting plea for understanding and preserving our myriad identities and traditions before they become forever lost on the relentless road toward a monocultural world.

.[A] riveting account of an indigenous culture pinned between tradition and modernity.Clark's talent for capturing the full complexity of the people he writes about keeps the book afloat as it navigates the treacherous waters of the 21st century. [A] page-turning account of a culture on the verge of being capsized by the monoculture of global capitalism... I recommend it highly.

This is a brilliant, exciting, and terrifying story that reveals the hidden world of Indonesian islanders who find themselves trapped between past and future--between hunting whales with bamboo spears to survive and an outside world poised to wipe them out.

This is an important book. The Last Whalers pays a muscular and compassionate witness to our odyssey of being human at the time of the Anthropocene. It is an investigation into our complexities, our desires and boundaries and contradictions - what the book's heroes, the Lamalerans, aptly call 'a typhoon of life.'

THE LAST WHALERS is one of the New York Times' "100 Notable Books of 2019"!

The Last Whalers is a true work of art. This lyrically written and richly observed book not only tells of the Lamalerans' spectacular feats of seamanship, but also demonstrates, with heartrending power, what all of us will lose when the march of modernity touches humanity's final tradition-ruled outposts.

Equal parts rollicking adventure and careful anthropology, The Last Whalers opened up a fresh and fascinating world to me. From the very first lines, I was riveted.

The Last Whalers is an extraordinary feat of reportage and illumination. It introduces a remote community and an endangered way of life, but it refuses to pander to familiar tropes of the exotic, instead bringing its subjects to the page in all their glorious complexity - in all their longing, triumphs, frustrations, and joys. Its gaze is global and intimate at once, tirelessly attuned to the tidal forces and subtle eddies of what it means to be alive.

...a vital, immersive and elegant debut.With glittering prose and a novelist's knack for storytelling, Clark carries readers to the heart of this community as they try to manage and adapt to the tidal wave of change that has recently arrived on their shore. Read more...

The journalist Doug Bock Clark, in order to write his immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable first book ... moved about as far from the world's air-conditioned urban centers as it is still possible to get.. The story Clark returned with - comprised of births and deaths, terrible injuries and old rituals, furtive love affairs and intertribal rivalries - has the texture and coloring of a first-rate novel. Read more...

Doug Bock Clark has delivered us an amazing account of an almost mythological fight - man versus leviathan - and in vivid prose he reveals the most profound truths about both how strong we are and how fragile we are. Part journalism, part anthropology, The Last Whalers is a spectacular and deeply empathetic attempt to understand a vanishing world. I absolutely loved this magnificent book.

A gripping story of a community struggling for its very survival, and of the clash between ancient and modern worlds. Clark has a graceful, almost poetic writing style, and his vivid portrait of the Lamalerans and their way of life evokes in the reader a stirring image of a lost world, an ancient society that has somehow stayed virtually untouched by the march of time...until now.

Clark's sympathy for and devotion to his subjects is real: he speaks both Indonesian and Lamaleran and fosters an intimacy that allows him to disappear entirely in the telling of their story.