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

Believe it or not, “what Melville did for whaling, Hohn has done for plastic bath toys lost at sea,” said Rob Verger in The Boston Globe.

(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.

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