Weyler's story includes a few other colorful personalities, notably John Cormack, the Quint-like fishing captain hired to pilot the activists on their early campaigns; the entrepreneur and adventurer David McTaggart, whose bravery was matched only by his orneriness as he battled the others over control and focus; and the ultra-radical Paul Watson, who split with the group over his advocacy of tactics too confrontational for the Greenpeacers and their dangerous but essentially peaceful methods of harassment.

Alas, the story's vivid personalities sometimes get lost in the narrative, especially as the group's success attracts more and more members and supporters who are introduced with little or no description. Perhaps in his zeal to give everyone his or her due, Weyler overloads us with people we don't have the time to get to know. All those names sometimes make the brain fog up. The minutiae of political wrangling, both within the group and in its dealings with the military and commercial powers-that-be, can also be a little tedious to follow.

It's worth sticking it out, though. First of all, Weyler's careful analysis and sympathetic presentation of the multiple points of view within the environmental movement serves to convince the reader that he is a trustworthy guide to this history, and that's essential for a narrator who is also a participant and a partisan. Also, though this isn't one of those histories that reads like a novel, Weyler's plainspoken writing flows nicely, and the story has plenty of drama.

Indeed, many stretches are gripping. David McTaggart getting beaten up, and having his small sailing vessel rammed by a French warship as he "bears witness" to nuclear testing in the South Pacific; scientist Paul Spong's dawning awareness of the powerful intelligence of whales, and his passionate spreading of the gospel to the rest of the group; intrepid Greenpeacers following trails of blood across the ice to the seal killing fields, risking death in winter storms; even the author's prevailing upon a concert promoter to put together a huge benefit show in an impossibly short period of time, or an activist smuggling a roll of film past the French military in her vagina; these and other episodes get the reader's root-for-the-underdog blood flowing and, not incidentally, spark his sympathy for the cause.

Not surprisingly, Weyler's most vivid writing is inspired by the actions in which he himself took part. The book climaxes with Greenpeace's harrowing but spectacularly successful 1975 campaign to interfere with the Soviet whaling fleet. Weyler's account of this voyage reads like a real-life Melville adventure yarn. Against the backdrop of political jockeying by the great powers - the U.S. government supporting Greenpeace because it wanted deep-sea oil rights, the Chinese approving of the "Canadian attempt to challenge the hegemony of Soviet revisionism in the North Pacific," to name but two factors - a more-or-less hardy band of "mystics" inspired by Native American mythology, Buddhism and the I Ching, and "mechanics" who could navigate a boat, fix an engine, or build a radio from salvaged parts, took to the open ocean on a carefully timed mission of protest, with only very partial clues as to where they might find their quarry. Weyler's descriptions are fascinating and evocative: