Shark Life

Peter Benchley. You may have heard of him because he authored the extremely famous book Jaws, which was made so famous with help from the classic movie of the same name directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown. But I do not want to write about Steven Spielberg and the Jaws crew, or Peter Benchley in regards to his book Jaws. 

What I want to let you all know is how excellent his last book; Shark Life: True Stories about Sharks and the Sea really is. 


This non-fiction book is written so well, and moves at an appetite inducing pace you may feel like you are the shark. If you are even mildly interested in sharks, the ocean, diving, surfing or are just intrigued by things voracious this is the book for you. This is true to life tales of Mr. Benchley's happenings in the ocean of sharks. In cages and out of cages, in deep water and shallow, in rivers and within his memories. 


One of my favorite chapters is #7 titled Six Dangerous Sharks. In  this chapter Peter goes on to name and describe the certain sharks and their characteristics, and then also with a real world examples. This is thrilling reading and I ate it up.
A very important part of this book is that the overall tenure is not Jaws. That is, it is not about the monster from the deep sinking fishing boats, closing beaches, and disrupting economy. Some of the stories are very scary and heart pounding indeed, but this book is about real sharks, what they are, where they are; and how we as human beings relate to them in their environment, and more importantly how we can ensure they remain the alpha predators they need to be.

And to the salient motions that we humans aspire, one of which is that we are the caretakers of all things because we are conscious. I found reading this book showed me that we are not. It made me (said) conscious of the fact that humans have their place. We have an impact yes, but we a merely a piece of the fleece. The perfection of humanity is willful change, we can make a difference because we want to. A shark does not want, a shark is, and its being is extremely different and perpetually thrilling.

This is a great read and I highly recommend it.

I use a Kindle so I get my digital stuff from Amazon. For real books I  shop locally between Half Price Books and Barnes and Noble. Sad to see Bay Books leave Concord, I liked that store.

Links to buy this book:
Amazon • Barnes and Noble • Random House