Shark Attack!

“Travel thirty miles north, south, or east of San Francisco city hall and you’ll be engulfed in a landscape of thick traffic, fast enterprise, and six-dollar cappuccinos. Venture thirty miles due west, however, and you will find yourself on what is virtually another planet: a spooky cluster of rocky islands called the Farallones, battered by foul weather, thronged with two hundred thousand seabirds, and surrounded by the largest great white sharks in the world.” (From the book jacket)

Well, now. That grabs one’s attention.

“That so many of these magnificent and elusive animals lived in the 415 area code, crisscrossing each other under the surface like jets stacked in a holding pattern, seemed stunningly improbable – and irresistible” to Susan Casey, who joined two biologists who live on the islands and study the sharks.

She tells us about it in The Devils’ Teeth (©2005), which is one of those books you must not read after 2 PM or either sleep will be impossible or one’s dreams will be thronged with 18-foot monsters. Brrrrrrrr!