Red Leviathan

The Secret History of Soviet Whaling

By: Ryan Tucker Jones

Narrated by: Ryan Tucker Jones

Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction.

As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior.

Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether.

©2022 Ryan Tucker Jones (P)2022 Tantor

Jeeeeeezus the narration is ROUGH

My God, I’m only through two or three chapters in and I already feel a need to come make a special mid-book review note about the narration style. The extremely slow, halting 2-5 word - pause - 2-5 word - pause - 2-5 word style of narrating makes this otherwise interesting tale incredibly difficult to listen to. Rarely do I bag a particular aspect of a book, I’ve only written 2 partially negative book/audiobook/etc reviews, ever and this is the second one. I’m struggling mightily to even follow the story, it’s just that distracting. Even more so at 2.0x speed where I had to set speed in order to move the narration along quick enough to even follow the story. I’m going to try to grind through because I’m really interested in the USSR whaling subject matter and it’s a rarely written subject. The writing/story is otherwise good BUT the publishers seriously need to consider having the audio re-done because as is it’s almost totally unlistenable.

Interesting read

This was an easy listen. I leared a lot from this book and found it very interesting.