About this title: Susan Casey was a journalist who became enthralled with the world of the great white shark after seeing a BBC documentary on the subject. She spent three weeks in the forbidding waters around the Farallon Islands (aka "the devil's teeth") just off the coast of San Francisco, where the sharks go every fall to prey on the hapless sea lions that live ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Date Published: 06/2005
ISBN-13:9780805075816ISBN:080507581X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 304 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Very slight edgewear. No spine creases. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 291 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Very slight edgewear. Pages unmarked, bright and tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 291 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Clean book with light cover wear. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 291 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
ISBN-13:9780805075816ISBN:080507581X
Description: Used-Good in Fair jacket. FIRST EDITION hardcover; Good condition. Dust jacket has minor shelf wear; clean pages; book has minor shelf wear; tight spine uncreased; Reliable customer service and no-hassle return policy. read more
Edition: Illustrated.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780805075816ISBN:080507581X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. hard cover, 11a3, minor shelf/edge wear. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 304 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780805075816ISBN:080507581X
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co
Date Published: 2005-06-07
ISBN-13:9780805075816ISBN:080507581X
Description: Very Good. Used library discard w/ markings, mylar dj over original dj, pgs clean & tight, First Class shipping if available for faster service. read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"Not a bad book. A moderately detailed account of shark research on the Farallon Islands.
The book has some cool history of the Farallones, and the stories of the shark researchers are pretty awesome. Casey herself is extremely frustrating as a person. The last quarter of the book is hard to read as a result.
It's a nice, fast airport read, although the tone is a bit pulpy (the author is a writer for Time magazine). Could have used more shark stories and less of Casey's fear of ghosts, and trials / tribulations living on a boat.
In short, I wish it was a little more 'Planet Earth' and a little less 'Shark Week.'"
"I heard an interview with the author on NPR when Wayne and I were driving through a dark New Mexico night, and decided I had to read this book. The author became ridiculously obsessed with the great white sharks that congregate in the waters surrounding the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco. The story and her description of the research are completely fascinating, but I questioned her judgment repeatedly to the point that she was sometimes quite irritatingly selfish. However, she seems to tell the story honestly, flaws and all, and it's a good read."
"This cool book I saw at the library--the title says it all.
A reporter develops an obsession with great white sharks and spends time in the Farallon Islands off of Sand Francisco. I never knew this, but the largest of the Great Whites come here every Sept-Nov to feast on seals. Not a few sharks, but so many that if you fall in the water,you have a better than 50:50 chance that one of them will have you over for dinner, and I don't mean appetizers and white wine. On the Islands live some robust biologists who study the sharks by taking a little boat they've named "The Dinner Plate" to where seals have been freshly killed. There, in the bloody water, the scientists observe the sharks feeding, tag them, take photographs, and hope to arrive home safely. So far, they have, because the sharks like seals more than metal.
The author does a good job discussing her obsession and the incredible people who risk their lives studying Great Whites so big. The Farallon sharks are twice the size of their more famous cousins in the Great Barrier Reef and off South Africa. I'm talking 18 to >20 feet long and as wide and deep as a bus. Literally.
I think we all are fascinated with White Sharks. But, they turn out not to be nasty killers at first sight, but rather, take their good time scoping out their potential prey. Then they dive and come up from below at 40 miles per hour, breaching in the process at the time of the kill. That's why you can't see them coming. They also hunt by SIGHT and not smell. This one surprised me.
The Devil's Teeth was a good fast read, without the hype one usually gets related to sharks, nor the gore. But it made me go to youtube and watch a few seals meet their maker in the Farralons. Awesome and thought provoking."
"It's not often I come across a nonfiction book that is a can't-put-it-down, stay-up-all-night page turner. But this book about the Farallone Islands, the great white sharks who live there, and the researchers who study them is just such a book. It is filled with dramatic bloody attacks that I would have thought would make me feel sorry for the seal and sea lion victims, but the researcher's stories about the sharks express such warmth and appreciation for the various shark personalities, I ended up being more worried about the great whites getting enough to eat than I was about the ones being eaten.
In addition Susan Casey writes about the history of the other Farallone animal populations and the people who wiped them out. There was the decimation of the fur seals which began in 1807 and within two years had killed 73,000 animals, from a population of 40,000 per season to 54. The Farallone Egg Company came next, to harvest the hundreds of thousands of softball-sized murre eggs covering the rocks of the islands, using italian immigrant "eggers" working under slave-labor-like conditions. Then the military showed up, deciding in 1916, to turn the Farallons into a fortress with harbors for torpedo ships and submarines and to ring the islands with sixteen-inch guns. Finally, in 1969, the Farallones were designated a National Wildlife Refuge and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory was contracted to repair the damage.
Upon finishing the book I found myself searching web sites for updates on the various sharks I had come to know, looking for Farallone photos and in general becoming somewhat Farallone obsessed. I even wanted to move there, which is kind of insane given that the weather is everything I most hate- foggy, wet, dreary, gray, and accessible only by a three to six hour boat ride often through nauseating ten foot swells.
EXCERPT: "Every September, one of the world's largest and densest congregations of great white sharks assembles in the waters surrounding the Farallon Islands, a 211-acre archipelago of ten islets in the Pacific, twenty-seven miles due west of the Golden Gate Bridge. No one fully understands what this gathering represents, why great whites, the ocean's most solitary hunters, choose to reside for a period of time in such close quarters. What's known for sure is that the sharks remain at this location for approximately three months. And this: having studied them for over a decade and a half in the Farallon White Shark Project, Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle have discovered that year after year, the same sharks return to exactly the same spot.
This annual reunion is at least partly about hunting. Despite strange inventories of items found in great white stomachs- a cuckoo clock, a fur cape, licnese plates and lobster traps, a buffalo head, an entire reindeer, and even, in one unlikely scenario, a man dressed in a full suit of armor- what these sharks really love to eat are seals. And the Farallones are dripping with seals- northern elephant seals, harbor seals, fur seals, seals, seals, seals- all barking and bellowing, draped on the rocks like a blubbery carpet..""
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