The Devils Teeth: Book Review

This guy will have you paddling with your fingertips

My friend Baird Blanton from the The Treachery of Others (great band) recently reccomended that I read "The Devil's Teeth", by Susan Casey. I had just finished reading "The Wave", so I was excited to check this book out.

Baird brought this book up because I was telling him about an upcoming surf trip to the Gulf Coast, and he said "what about sharks"? After reading this book, I know now why he asked me that. This is a description of the sheer magnitude of a great white shark from Susan Casey's book The Devils Teeth:

"The first thing I noticed about the shark was it's immense girth...for context here are some measurements: a twenty-foot shark is eight feet wide and six feet deep. that's wider than a Suburban, as wide as a Mack truck. That's wider than Yao Ming is tall".

Manresa State Beach, where I saw a shark once

Although there are no great whites in Texas, there are plenty of great whites where I grew up in Santa Cruz, CA. I've only seen a shark once in my life (at Manresa State Beach), and I have never been afraid of being eaten by a shark despite my all the time I spent in the water. While it is something that used to cross my mind from time to time, I was always a believer in probability and the odds of meeting one of these giants. Susan agreed with me:

"In any given year more than a thousand people will be maimed by toilet bowl cleaning products or killed by cattle. Fewer than a dozen will be attacked by a great white shark".

With those odds, and currently living in Texas, I would say cattle would be my greatest threat at this point. Overall, the book is a great story about the Faralllon Islands (that lie only 27 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge), and a reporter who braves the elements. While on the island they cruise around looking for sharks on a small boat called "The Dinner Plate". This makes perfect sense (not) considering you are on a boat smaller than some of the largest predators on the planet that you are searching for. I would highly recommend this book, and also check out The Wave by Susan Casey as well. Live Happily Ever Now!

50 Book Club

In elementary school we used to have a contest called fifty book club. If enough kids read that many books (50), our class would win an ice cream party. I'm not sure if we won or not, but I do remember that "Choose Your Own Adventure" books would count, and that I would deliberately make choices in the book that I know would lead to an ill fate, in order to help win the contest.



Lately my adult fifty book club has consisted of several books that were pretty enjoyable. When I was in Sweden I read The The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Trilogy, Book 1)series, and it was pretty cool to be in Sweden while reading those books. Too bad the Author is dead (his family is fighting his girlfriend/co-writer for the profits), as I would have liked to continue reading the series.

I also read The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel and Kurt Vonnegut's "Man Without Country" when I returned to the USA. Kurt Vonnegut may be my favorite author, and to read his final book is almost like sitting down with him and having him tell you about life. If you have never read a book by Kurt, you are seriously missing out.

The last book of 2010 (I'm assuming) was "The Wave" by Susan Casey. This book had a really cool dichotomy look inside the lives of big wave surfers like Laird Hamilton and the scientists who study large waves. It was a not only scientific, but also reminded me why I love surfing so much.