SHARKS!
They fascinate all of us at some level, but few have committed their lives to studying them like Greg Skomal. He constantly references the Hopper scientist from Jaws, but he's actually lived that life in reality. In a big book that never feels too long, we get to know him and the world of shark researchers.
This book ends up being many different things that work well together. It's Greg's professional (and personal) memoir of how a tv show showed him a career path that he's made real, as he follows each step from school, to study, to internships, to grunt work on a boat, to each job that has put him at ground zero (Martha's Vineyard + Cape Cod) for the emergence of a large and overwhelming Great Shark population.
He follows individual sharks through their migration, hunting, feeding, and human interactions. Adding science, his research data, and firsthand observation of why they're now on the rise in Cape Cod and surrounding regions.
It catalogs, in real-time, the shark close calls, attacks, and incidents as they happened to him and others in the New England area.
And it delivers, like a long Shark Week documentary (as Greg has often been directly involved in Shark Week funded research trips) on thrilling, exciting, frightening, and real talk on all things sharks.
As someone always curious, this book takes you along for the ride of Greg's lifetime and gives you plenty of stories, trivia, and background knowledge to add to the shark conversation. Greg's life now is much in dealing with the politics, town halls, beach closures, shark tracking technology, fundraising, and educational awareness of the public, as we have no choice but to understand and respond to sharing the same waters with these apex predators.