THE WHALE: a huge, intelligent, warm-blooded and little-understood mammal that provides for its young in the same way as humans It also provides splendid target practice, When a pregnant fin whale was trapped in a shallow Newfoundland tidal basin in 1967 it offered the world a unique chance to study a rare and remarkable animal more or less in its natural state. In this horrifying, true-life book Farley Mowat tells what happened instead,. He tells of: the savagery of the 'sportsmen' who filled her hide with round after round of high-velocity ammunition the pomposity of the scientists who showed no interest or sympathy towards the dying beast the callousness and greed shown by certain commercial and government interests concerned only with 'dragging Newfoundland into the twentieth century". But he tells also of love. The trapped 
whale's husband stayed near-by, frightening shoals of herring towards her for food, and uttering cries of reassurance. "Remarkable not only for the high quality of its writing but for its unsentimentality ... an angry record of terrible waste'-Evening Standard