Passion is contagious, and that's why Andrew Darby's Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling (Da Capo Press) is so enlightening and entertaining, despite its scholarly style. At least since the time of Melville and his masterpiece — Moby Dick was a quest for a sperm whale, by the way — the sheer size of whales, their majesty and their near invisibility, give them a mythic aura: not only larger than life, but larger, much larger, than our separate lives.

Darby's book is important because, along with its mother-lode of information on various kinds of whales, it is both lament and warning. We kill them in a way — with the harpoon  — that may not at all be as painless to its victims as some whale stalkers would claim. But we also kill them with a brazen, loudly egotistic disregard for their number and their future on this planet where they happen to be unlucky enough to inhabit with Homo sapiens.

Is Harpoon yet another cautionary tale of man's abuse and cruelty to animals? Yes, it is. Do we need yet another one of those? Yes, we do.

Andrew Darby, free of polemic, has done us all a great service, and it's best we listen now before it's too late. At once, Darby takes us on an oceanic dig, of sorts: we learn the truth and lore about five species of whale: Right, Blue, Sperm, Minke, and Humpback. And we also learn of the threats to their survival either by outlaw or law-skirting fishermen who go whaling of course for money, but also for, cruelly, the symbolism or nostalgia of it, and thus rob us of a majesty we can claim simply by coexisting with such a great and varied creature.

At heart, that's what this book is about: not whales, but whaling. As Darby says, "The control of whaling [in the twentieth century] became what it remains today: a struggle between the best and worst of human nature. Great hopes, held out when the International Whaling Commission was founded, were gradually crushed. Rules offered in optimism, in practice, encouraged cheating."

The Whaling Commission, or IWC as it's known, is essentially the bad guy here. Says Darby, "The IWC today is colored by the cold calculations of international politics among nations with little or no knowledge of whales." Here we go again: another multi-national body, this being the IWC, which was begun with noble intentions, but not so any longer, subject as it is to cajole and manipulation by involved countries, notably Japan and Russia.