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Twentieth-Century Shore-Station Whaling in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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TWENTIETH-CENTURY SHORE-STATION WHALING IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR. By ANTHONY B. DICKINSON and CHESLEY W. SANGER. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7735-2881-4. xvii + 254 p., maps., b & w illus., appendices, notes, bib., index. Hardbound. Cdn$49.95.

Whales and whaling have aroused literary and scholarly interest for many reasons. Among them are the grandeur of these large species; their spiritual, nutritional, social, and commercial importance to coastal peoples who depend upon living marine resources; the historical and present challenges met in their capture, use, and management as resources; and questions inspired by their behavior.

The present volume is a lucid, objective, thoroughly researched, and historically grounded regional account of modern whaling in waters around Newfoundland and Labrador. Its authors and publisher merit top marks for presenting a valuable contribution to Newfoundland literature and evidence of our wider failure to use the sea's renewable living resources--in this case, whales of various species--without driving them to the precipice of biological collapse, if not extinction. The book results from a collaboration between two Memorial University of Newfoundland geographers: Chesley Sanger, whose interest in North Atlantic whaling reaches back to about 1980, when he studied Scottish whaling and its influence on sealing; and Anthony Dickinson, who has collaborated with Sanger on studies of shore-whaling in Newfoundland and Labrador since about 1990.

Ten well-annotated chapters take readers from Newfoundland and Labrador's earliest inhabitants, beginning in 7000 BC, to the decline and cessation of whaling in its waters in 1972, when...

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