Winner of the Library Journal's Best of 2013 (2013)

Behold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant...

King lays bare the background to Moby-Dick by moving through the voyage of the Pequod, exploring topics in marine biology, oceanography, and the science of navigation as Ishmael raises them in the novel.