At first his investigation was more or less capricious. His wife was pregnant with their first child, and he worked as a teacher in a good school in New York. He imagined the waters of the Pacific covered by an armada of little yellow ducks, dispersed by the currents as the years passed, appearing in blocks of ice in the Arctic or in the seaweed washed up by the tide on beaches in Brazil or New England. On the basis of his early readings, which very soon led him to neglect his work and lose days at a time in periodical rooms consulting obscure journals on maritime commerce or tracking down information on the Internet, Hohn learned that the 28,800 toy animals were little yellow ducks with big eyes and an orange bill like the ones that float in children’s bathtubs all over the world. Inside one of them was a shipment of 28,800 plastic toys made in China and destined for the United States.
Later he would discover that in reality it had not been a shipwreck: a freighter, the Ever Laurel, was caught in a terrible storm, and during one of the violent pitches that almost sank it, some of the containers stored on deck slid into the ocean. Some years ago, Donovan Hohn happened to read the story of a shipwreck that occurred in 1992 in the most desolate area of the Pacific Northwest, south of the Aleutian Islands. There are others that seem to write themselves and grow, guided more or less blindly, by the power of an obsession.
To some extent, I see it as a metaphor of the transfer of power and economic wealth from the American century to the future Asian century.Ī good read and well recommended book for those interested in any of the genres discussed above.There are books that someone plans and writes in an orderly fashion about a particular topic. For example, I find it interesting that the container ship industry was invented by an American in the early 1950’s. Nevertheless, the book is full of fun facts and historical asides. In particular, I enjoyed the self-effacing style of the author who provides a humble and sympathetic narration. Starting in the Pacific Ocean, the ride journeys backwards to their point of creation in China and forward through where the washed up on Alaskan shores and finally through the Artic and the Altantic Ocean where they would meet their final demise. The author takes us along for the ride of what happened to a lost shipment of bath toys. A story of obsession, travel, globalism, environmentalism, American literature and a story of home, hearth and fatherhood. As a result, I enjoyed listening to Donovan Hohn’s book on the adventure of bath toys on my commute to work. I love books that integrate more than genre in its book jacket. Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author,Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn.
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