The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Survival and Obsession Among America's Great White Sharks (Abridged)

by Susan Casey Narrated by Susan Casey

Overview

Travel thirty miles north, south, or east of San Francisco city hall and you'll be engulfed in a landscape of thick traffic, fast enterprise, and six-dollar cappuccinos. Venture thirty miles due west, however, and you will find yourself on what is virtually another planet: a spooky cluster of rocky islands called the Farallones.

Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins swirling around a tiny boat in a documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the narrator said, some of them topping eighteen feet in length, and each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast. That so many of these magnificent and elusive animals lived in the 415 area code, crisscrossing each other under the surface like jets stacked in a holding pattern, seemed stunningly improbable--and irresistible. Casey knew she had to see them for herself.

Within a matter of months she was in a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler, being hoisted up a cliff face onto the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island--part of the group know to the nineteenth-century sailors as "Devil's Teeth." There she joined the two biologists who study the sharks, bunking down in the island's one habitable building, a haunted, 120-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Less than forty-eight hours later she had her first encounter with the famous, terrifying jaws and was instantly hooked. Curiousity yielded to obsession, and when the opportunity arose to return for a longer stay she jumped at it. But as Casey readied herself for shark season, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands.

The Devil's Teeth offers a rare glimpse into the lives of nature's most mysterious predators, and of those who follow them. Here is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a story of crossing the boundary between society and an untamed place where humans are neither wanted nor needed.

Editorial Reviews

OCT/NOV 05 - AudioFile

Just a few dozen miles off San Francisco lie the Farallon Islands. The rocky outcroppings, known to nineteenth-century sailors as the Devil’s Teeth, are part of a marine wildlife sanctuary, which is home to scores of great white sharks for several months a year. Susan Casey’s story of the sharks and the scientists who study them is part magazine article, part travelogue, part character study, and part biological essay. Her writing is clear and easy to follow, and she mixes in the science so effectively that listeners won’t realize how much they’re learning. However, her reading, while serviceable, falls a little short. Her diction is casual at times, consistently dropping the “ed” on past tenses and pronouncing “Farallon” as one syllable. It’s a small distraction, though. This production includes a bonus CD with digital images of the sharks. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 05 - AudioFile

Just a few dozen miles off San Francisco lie the Farallon Islands. The rocky outcroppings, known to nineteenth-century sailors as the Devil’s Teeth, are part of a marine wildlife sanctuary, which is home to scores of great white sharks for several months a year. Susan Casey’s story of the sharks and the scientists who study them is part magazine article, part travelogue, part character study, and part biological essay. Her writing is clear and easy to follow, and she mixes in the science so effectively that listeners won’t realize how much they’re learning. However, her reading, while serviceable, falls a little short. Her diction is casual at times, consistently dropping the “ed” on past tenses and pronouncing “Farallon” as one syllable. It’s a small distraction, though. This production includes a bonus CD with digital images of the sharks. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175098021
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/03/2005
Edition description:	Abridged

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