One day a couple of months ago, Robert Sullivan stood at the counter of the bookstore wearing the expression of a man who was trying to remember the title of a book that was just escaping him. We get that a lot.

In fact he was trying to sort out what was different and what was the same about the bookstore since the time when he wrote A Whale Hunt, when he lived for long stretches on the Olympic Peninsula over the course of two years, sometimes in a tent, sometimes in a structure he describes as a "shanty", ocassionally in a motel. This is now fully two decades ago, so the mental effort of putting it all back together is entirely understandable.

I'd seen the book in "Outdoor" section, but I didn't realize how much detail about the Neah Bay, the lives of the personnages of the famous whale hunt, and about the Makah tribe itself the book contained. I found it absolutely fascinating.

I loved the nuanced and contextualized perspective on the events that resulted in Sullivan embedding himself in the place while the slow-to-occur whale hunt takes place. He's generous and honest. He's also a bit of an odd duck. There's an essay about Moby Dick spread out in the footnotes of the book. It's literally the only thing he uses footnotes for. It's supurfluous and a gag.