Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy
This month I will be reviewing Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. This book was a New York Times bestseller written by an author who was won a number of awards and honors, including a lifetime achievement award from the Humane Society of the United States and the New England Booksellers Association.
I volunteer at a local zoo and we started a book club recently and this was the first book for our group to read and discuss (it was decided that all books would be animal focused, given we're all zoo volunteers). It was presented as one we could use to learn information about an animal we have at the zoo and therefore share more information with our visitors. Given the title and how it was presented to the group I thought I would learn tons of information about octopuses (turns out that is the correct plural for an octopus).
While I did learn some new information about octopuses, the book was more of a recounting of the author's experiences with octopuses, primarily at the New England Aquarium in Boston. It was interesting to hear the personality descriptions of the different octopuses she got to know and be around. Most are very curious creatures and a lot of the descriptions reminded me of a small child discovering new things and having new experiences. From that aspect, I did enjoy the book.
From the perspective of I was excited to learn tons of new things about the octopus, it was a bit disappointing. The author did not have enough information about the octopus to fill an entire book so she filled the book by sharing stories about unrelated adventures she's had, personal information about the people she got to know while visiting the Aquarium and a whole chapter (30+ pages!) on her getting her SCUBA diving certification so she could see octopuses in the wild. (It's worth noting that I did enjoy this chapter, it just wasn't octopus specific and seemed like filler, given the title of the book.)
The Aquarium doesn't breed its octopuses so there isn't a steady flow of octopuses to fill their octopus exhibit. This means that every octopus they have has been taken from the wild for this purpose. The author doesn't address the concerns over this other than to say that there is an abundance of octopuses in the ocean and this use of them does not hurt their status. But it did make me think. I have struggled with animals being kept in captivity but feel slightly better that the zoo I volunteer at doesn't remove animals from the wild. The animals we have were either born in captivity and know no other life, were injured and can no longer survive in the wild, or were captured by others and then later had to be surrendered and placed at our zoo. Animals that have been injured and can be rehabilitated and returned to the wild are returned to the wild. The Aquarium this book focuses on, however, takes the octopus from the wild for the soul purpose of drawing a crowd to see it. The author described a situation where one octopus died suddenly (they only have one at a time) and there was a desperate need for a new one because they HAD to have one on exhibit. That process was disturbing to me and tainted my enjoyment of the rest of the book - but I did finish it! And there are a lot of sweet stories about the individual octopuses. I can't give it a wholehearted "must have" recommendation for the reasons I mentioned but if you love animals and would like to learn a bit more about the octopus, you might enjoy this book.
For more book reviews, click on the link at the top of this post.
