The Book is Here!

Dear Friends,

My book has finally arrived and is now available on Amazon. It's available for Kindle through Amazon too. I think physical copies will make it to local bookstores in the next few weeks. I hope that  those of you who stumble blindly onto this blog, struggling through some of the more tangled and less visited parts of the Internet, will consider buying it.

I'm sure that, even though I've tried to write a carefully-researched and definitive book on ambergris, there will be no shortage of people who still have questions or who disagree with me. Already, I've been contacted by quite a few people -- unqualified people, incidentally -- who want to tell me that ambergris is whale vomit. It's as if I signed a contract to write a book about ambergris, researched the subject for two years and then, somehow, neglected to learn even the first thing about ambergris. But I didn't.

Regardless, those with comments are welcome to leave them here. And any readers with questions can contact me via the email address listed here too. I'll always do my best to answer the questions as quickly and fully as possible. I really like to hear from people!

From Scientific American magazine (2007): "But don't refer to it as "whale vomit"; scientists postulate that whales do not expel ambergris through their mouths. No one has ever seen a sperm whale excrete ambergris, although sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, admits that it is assumed the voiding takes place as fecal excretion, because when first cast out, he says, 'Well, it smells more like the back end than the front.'"

Never have truer words been spoken.

Best,

--ck