Doreen Cunningham - Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir

Striking, brave, and often lyrical. The Guardian

Soundings

Journeys in the Company of Whales

A Memoir

Doreen Cunningham

This book is a gorgeous journey. Cunningham guides us elegantly from Mexico to Alaska, riding along with wild gray whales. And she excels as well at bringing the reader along on her personal journey of motherhood, struggle, and epiphany. You will be glad youve joined her.

Susan Orlean, author of On Animals and The Library Book

A raw and rapturous work of nature writing. Or is it memoir? Adventure journalism? Pop science? Climate cri de coeur? This foulmouthed, gimlet-eyed, bighearted chimera of a book is all of thoseand more.

Robert Moor, bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration

In this fascinating book, Doreen Cunningham takes us on an intimate journey through a world already altered by climate change. As her own travel companions become oursthe indigenous people of Utqiavik, the whales of the Pacific, the worlds scientists, and her little son Maxwe learn that it is only by coming together as people and species that we will be able to navigate our way ahead in the vast troubled waters of our shared future.

Sjn, author of The Whispering Muse

Through her journey from Mexico to Alaska, Doreen Cunningham develops what can only be described as a spiritual relationship with the gray whales. Readers will be further enriched by her ability to seamlessly integrate traditional Indigenous knowledge and science of the sea, ice, and world of the Iupiat who hunt the mammoth baleen whales.

Rosita K aahni Worl, PhD, president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute

Soundings is a story of whales and people, of kinship and questing, and, perhaps most of all, of the connections among our human selves and across species. With a lyrical voice and tremendous emotional honesty, Doreen Cunningham defies genre and skips easy romance to bring us a cetacean journeyand a journey into the tough, transformative stuff of making community in this beautiful, harsh, and changeable world.

Bathsheba Demuth, PhD, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

A spellbinding journey of discovery told with deep sensitivity and honesty.

Dr. Edith Widder, CEO and senior scientist of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association

I see in Doreen Cunningham a kindred spirit. Her experience in Arctic Alaska is one I recognize, with individuals I know and love. Written with a sure hand and an unfailing eye for the right detail, Cunninghams prose sings. This is a journey well worth taking.

Debby Dahl Edwardson, author of Blessings Bead and My Name Is Not Easy

This stunning book blends nature writing of the most urgent kind with precise and poetic observation of human tribulation and the interconnectedness of all things. Fresh, brave, and unique.

Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places

Doreens is a thrilling, passionate, and tenderhearted adventure. I read this book in one sitting and couldnt sleep that nightmy mind was still filled with her extraordinary endurance, her wild spirit.

Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

What a voice! What a book! Pounding with the power of thrashing flukes, shivering with Arctic ice, yet suffused with rare human warmth. A book worthy of its mighty subjects.

Charles Foster, author of Being a Human

Soundings stuns with its bravery and lyricism. Doreen seamlessly weaves themes and stories of failure, love, and survival. This is an intimate memoir told as a travelers journey into nature and science, powerful in its honesty and beautiful writing. This is a book to be devoured.

Ramita Navai, author of City of Lies

Cunninghams scientific knowledge and gorgeous prose take us on an extraordinary journey as she forges a remarkable connection with these astonishing creatures and issues an impassioned plea for our shared futures. Soundings is a completely unique, unforgettable book.

Erica Wagner, author of Seizure and Chief Engineer

Defiant, despairing, hopeful, restless, and compelledDoreen Cunningham grabs our hands and takes us with her on a wild journey through danger, motherhood, upheaval, and love. Soundings is resonant with the voices of endangered whales and the essential truth that our failures and imperfections are tangled with our unique strengths and beauty. This is a book that grips and doesnt let go.

Rebecca Schiller, author of A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention

Beautiful and brave, and startling in its raw emotional honesty.

Neil Ansell, author of Deep Country and The Circling Sky

An intimate and fascinating story of one womans journey with our most charismatic species.

Mark Boyle, author of The Way Home

Soulful, honest, insightful, humane, and best of all, propulsive I was deeply moved and fell in love with Doreens story.

Jini Reddy, author of Wanderland

Beautifully written, insightful, and gripping.

Daniel Lavelle, author of Down and Out

To my children, all children, human and nonhuman.

Wind spits spray in my face. Water slops against the sides of our small fishing boat as it shudders out of the harbor, into a dawn that billows fire above and below the horizon. Max, my two-year-old, is up front helping drive the boat. I met the skipper, Chris, just twelve hours ago. We are borrowing a dad, one who has lived at sea and might be able to open a door into this secretive ocean. Today there is one last chance for things to go right. There is nothing to do except trust in this generous stranger, give myself over to the wind and the water, keep my eyes fixed on the waves, examining every curve, every roll, every swirl, every ripple.

Look that old rust bucket, shouts Max from inside the cabin, pointing. We are cruising slowly past the rust-streaked blue-and-white hulk of a commercial fishing boat. Hes channeling Grandpa Pig arguing with Granddad Dog from the Peppa Pig cartoon. The boats name, Faith, is written in strident white capital letters on the bow. I have to look away. I have lost faith in my idea of following the gray whale migration, in the whales themselves, and most of all in myself. I wanted to show Max how the mothers and calves travel thousands of miles from the lagoons of Baja California in Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, to prove to him that it is possible to do anything, to overcome anything, with just the two of us. It was me who needed convincing, though, and things havent gone to plan.

Kodiak Island, our final stop, is a major milestone on the gray whale highway and is our last chance to see them before we have to leave. On the map, the island looks as though its been carelessly thrown from the Alaskan mainland, as carelessly as Ive thrown away ten thousand pounds of bank loan to finance this trip. Our visas are spent too. The journey was supposed to help me start anew. It distracted me for a while, but now that its ending Im confronted by all I ran from, a list of my failings. I failed to set up a life for us that I could tolerate, failed to earn enough money to support us, failed to just get on with it like everyone else. Ive repeatedly and spectacularly failed at love and of course failed to see what a stupid idea this journey was in the first place. Im reeling with so much failure that my legs are unsteady and I grip the side of the boat, press my hands onto the wood. My fingers leave no impression. We slide past