Along the way, readers encounter a breadth of facts and wonderment just as vast and encyclopedic as found in Melville’s whale of a tale … of a whale. Following Hohn from an initial journalist’s web search to the deck of a freight ship in the icy Arctic sea, the reader is treated to a healthy assortment of asides, tangents and queries hard to anticipate at the book’s beginning. The title’s playful allusion to Moby Dick, for instance, turned out to be more apt and more rewarding than expected. But while you might rightly brand Moby Duck as a “fishing tale”, I don’t all together regret having been reeled in by the bait. Finally, for those piqued by the science of the tale, it turns out that random oceanic flotsam makes a poor vessel of data.ĭisclaimers and approximations are at the heart of the drama and science Hohn seeks. They’re not the squeaky, sunshine-yellow classics with the satisfied, tipsy smile. They’re plastic and they’re ducks, turtles, beavers and frogs. The rubber duckies, first off, aren’t actually rubber duckies exactly. There are a few disappointing, grown-up realities attending this book, and it’s best you face them now. Hohn, current GQ features editor, is the journalist who decided he’d get to the bottom of things, not realizing the pursuit would eat up a few years of his life. Here, as in the news, the facts took a back seat to the storytelling. One such headline inspired children’s author Eric Carle to adapt the story into one of his signature, illustrated tales. Stories of their incredible journey across the sea and their washing ashore made for fun copy, but it was almost always rife with factual inaccuracies.

The story of the castaway toys spread quickly through the news as a cute “human interest” piece.

As a book, it makes for a mixed bag in Donovan Hohn’s 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. Then, to heighten the drama, they began washing up on shore.Īs a catchy lead or a cocktail party anecdote, it’s a slamdunk. The romance and image of the ubiquitous childhood bath companion blithely bobbing by cathedrals of ice, dodging the yawning maws of leviathans, and crisscrossing the oceans (O the things you’ll see!) is infectious and arresting. In 1992, a freight crate of rubber duckies fell overboard in a North Pacific storm.

Moby duck book