The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World
This is not simply a book about a creature many of us will never see in its natural habitat. The mysterious eel is fascinating enough on its own (it’s a fish! and mostly predatory!), but the author is after something more. His memories of his father, told in alternating chapters, illuminate far beyond the scientific facts to reveal something universal about relationships. There are things somehow unknowable, he tells us, in both eels and ourselves.
Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition
Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even today, in an age o...






















