NYC BOOK AWARD 2007
Trying Leviathan
D. Graham Burnett
In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular - and biblically sanctioned - view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature - and how we know it - was at stake.
Pictured: Christina Burnett accepts for winner D. Graham Burnett
|
