Man is STILL the prey! This time, we're taking a SHARK SAFARI with "the incredible true story of nature's most perfectly constructed death machine!" Captain Hal Scharp offers scurvy sea dog wisdom alongside cutting edge scientific updates and 16 PAGES OF TERRIFYING PHOTOGRAPHS!
Right off the bat Scharp throws a little shade at Peter Benchley and others who write exaggerated stories of sharks without ever having been face to face with them. Salty Scharp takes us through a charmingly roughhewn history of sharkdom, claiming that these killers of the sea disprove Darwin's survival of the fittest due to their long success despite having tiny brains! It's more of a rhetorical flourish anyways but it's typical of Scharp's engaged, sometimes bewildering style. Elsewhere he gleefully estimates the prehistoric megalodon as maxing out at possibly 200 feet long! This is back when megalodon was theorized as a direct ancestor to the great white.
There's a long section of species descriptions which could have benefited from illustrations. The "terrifying" pictures included are sort of a grab bag, with a few live sharks, lots of dead ones, and lots of gory chewed up limbs.
Scharp also covers famous shark scientist Eugenie Clark, who was also profiled in H. David Baldridge's Shark Attack from 1974. The anti-shark spray developed by the Navy gets a passing grade from Scharp, despite Baldridge's assertion that it was effectively a placebo for stranded seamen. The International Shark Attack file is referenced, with Scharp instructing anyone who's attacked by a shark (and lives!) to write their experience to Baldridge, who also turns up in the bibliography at the end of the book. The 11 life saving steps to avoid shark attack are taken from Baldridge's research and Scharp is responsible enough to emphasize our current uncertainty as to shark behavior. Forewarned is forearmed, and better safe than sorry.
Sport fishing and commercial/industrial uses for sharks fill some pages. True to the book's era, Scharp assures us that "sharks are NOT worthless!" After all that beefy writing Scharp includes a glossary of shark terms and a very thorough bibliography, making this a welome addition to any layman's midcentury shark library.
This Award Books edition is an abridged version of the hardcover from the previous year:
This specific copy included a cool bookmark from a previous reader:
Award leaves us with a potpourri of ads: JFK's assassination, a spread of movie novelizations, and the Lusitania:
Award Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)
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