A Los Angeles Times Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 A Boston Globe Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 Amazon.com Editors pick as one of the 10 best history books of 2007 Winner of the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History "The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation." ―Nathaniel Philbrick The epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," Herman Melville proclaimed, and this absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. Eric Jay Dolin begins his vivid narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614. He then chronicles the rise of a burgeoning industry―from its brutal struggles during the Revolutionary period to its golden age in the mid-1800s when a fleet of more than 700 ships hunted the seas and American whale oil lit the world, to its decline as the twentieth century dawned. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs. Containing a wealth of naturalistic detail on whales, Leviathan is the most original and stirring history of American whaling in many decades. "I thought I learned everything I needed to know about whaling from Melville, but I was wrong. Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan exposes the rise and fall of the industry inspired by the great beasts of the deep . . . The excitement of the stories in this magnificently researched saga build and build." ( Dava Sobel, Author of Longitude ) "Dolin handles this long, complex tale with great skill, both as a historian and as a writer. Thanks to his firm command of the tale's narrative drive, Leviathan is thoroughly engaging." ( John Steele Gordon, The Wall Street Journal ) "A pleasantly anecdotal history of American whaling so comprehensive that he seems to have harpooned at least one fact from every cetacean text ever printed. Leviathan is a gentle book about a brutal industry." ( Caleb Crain, The New Yorker ) "Leviathan will appeal most to history buffs and ocean lovers. . . . Exotic locations, colorful characters, melodrama and gore aplenty, but also food for thought." ( Debby Applegate, Los Angeles Times ) "This volume reads like a history of America through whaling. . . . With a historian's diligence and a trivia nuts eye for oddities. He reels in the big one." ( Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly ) Eric Jay Dolin   is the best-selling author of fourteen books. His most recent is  A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes , which received a number of accolades, including being chosen by the  Washington Post  as one of 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020, by  Kirkus Reviews  as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 (in addition to being a Kirkus Prize finalist), by the  Library Journal  and  Booklist  as one of the Best Science & Technology Books of 2020, and by the  New York Times Book Review  as an "Editor's Choice." Other books include  Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America , which was chosen as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007 by the  Los Angeles Times  and the  Boston Globe , and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; and  Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates , which was chosen as a "Must-Read" book for 2019 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston Author's Club. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.