![]() ![]() ![]() Moby-Dick's encyclopaedic digressions on scrimshaw and flensing sit alongside passages of narrative excitement or mystical intensity, philosophical meditations and jokes. This is, as billed, a consciously Melvillean enterprise – a thing of patches and stitches. The mixture of whimsy and precision is well captured by Hohn's title, delighting as it does in a deflating pun and in its insistence on an exact and unround number. The Floatee bath toys, which ditched in the mid-Pacific en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington in January 1992, included a yellow duck, a red beaver, a blue turtle and a green frog. They've already inspired books by Eric Carle (of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame) and Christopher Brookmyre, and countless pages of journalistic spilled ink.Īmong the first things you learn from Donovan Hohn's book on the subject – which is an unusual combination of whimsy and factual punctiliousness – is that they aren't rubber and that only one in four of them is a duck. Washed-up ducks now go for hundreds of pounds on eBay. But when the containers in question were full of rubber ducks, and when those ducks are still, endlessly and unsinkably, wandering the watery ways of the world and washing up on beaches thousands of miles from the spill, the story became irresistible. E very year, anything between 2,000 and 10,000 containers tumble off ships into the sea. ![]()
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