Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea by Donovan Hohn

(Viking, $28)

For Donovan Hohn, the true tale of 7,200 shipwrecked rubber ducks was “a toy story too important not to follow,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Fifteen years after the Crayola-yellow bath toys and 21,600 animal mates were spilled from a container ship in the stormy North Pacific, the news reached Hohn and inspired him to do an odd-duck thing: In 2007, he quit his job as a high school English teacher to go on an Ahab-like quest to discover everything he could about what happened to the playthings. From that voyage has sprung an “adventurous, inquisitive” travelogue that whimsically invokes Melville as it chronicles Hohn’s journeys from southeast China to the Northwest Passage, and many places in between.

Who knew that chasing an armada of tiny ducks could result in such a “thought-provoking” work? said Dustin Michael Harris in the Chicago Sun-Times. Standing on trash-strewn beaches in Alaska and cruising through a floating garbage patch off Hawaii, Hohn contemplates the 6.4 million tons of waste spilled by container ships each year and has competing worries: What good are localized cleanups, and do plastic particles really become more toxic to sea life the longer they degrade? Visiting the factory in China where the lost ducks were produced, he’s awed to be able to press a 15-year-old castaway toy into its original mold but alert enough to notice that he’s stepped into a workplace scene that could be 1930s America.

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The “unique pleasure” of Hohn’s story is how much else he’s able to sneak in, said Kristin Thiel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He balances abstract contemplations with wonderful instances of “self-aware humor.” Once, when he tells a woman in a bar in Alaska about his quest, she pulls up the hood of his yellow raincoat and demands he quack. And he obliges. Occasionally, he drifts too far from the toy spill, said Rob Verger in The Boston Globe. But his book is so “alive with intellectual curiosity,” that hardly matters. Believe it or not, “what Melville did for whaling, Hohn has done for plastic bath toys lost at sea.”