Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean’s greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s—the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. And then, a series of events changed how we feel about them.

Jason M. Colby is professor of environmental and international history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He is the author of Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator (New York, 2018) and The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, 2011). He is currently writing a book entitled Devilfish: The History and Future of Gray Whales and People.

Read a review of Orca here.