This slender volume offers a colorful introduction to the history of Yankee whaling from the seventeenth-century Nantucket Quakers, who began hunting whales because their land was too poor for farming, to modern tourists, who go on whale watches. Well organized and clearly written, the book does a particularly good job of portraying life on a whaler in the 1800s and showing how whaling fit into broader events, such as the Revolutionary War.