Book Review: Emperors of the Deep

By: Sundial

Sharks are a wildly misunderstood animal and have faced serious consequences from this misunderstanding. This book by William Mckeever aims to help fight this misunderstanding with this book. This book introduces the reader to 4 species of sharks: the White Shark, the Tiger Shark, the Mako Shark, and the Hammerhead Shark. For each of these sharks, Mckeever details the wonders of these creatures from their great strength, speed, cunning, and unique lineage and reflects the diversity found within the classification of sharks. After describing the differences and uniqueness of each of these species, Mckeever details the plight of sharks, including human finning of sharks, hunting, and the fear that has caused the public to so greatly fear sharks.

I thought this book was very interesting and had a lot of fun facts that made me continue to read it throughout each of the sections. Not only did the author bring in facts about these four species but also the history of humans' relationship with sharks and input from people who have spent a lot of time with sharks or even have gotten bit by a shark and are still fighting for this group of wonderful animals. While there were many facts new to me as a person who knows a lot about marine biology and has a good understanding of sharks there were certain facts that were also more basic. Additionally, the information the author wanted to stress was sometimes stressed to the point of almost being repetitive. Overall this was not a huge takeaway from the book but it just meant some points were a little boring.

Overall I liked this book because of its importance to the message that is being sent but also because it was an interesting book. It kept me interested in information and around-the-world adventures that the author took us on to help the reader understand the challenges sharks are facing today. This book held information that made me interested, and fascinated, but also sad at some times, seeing what humans are doing to sharks. This book was made for people who don't know much about sharks but even for me it added greatly to my knowledge of sharks and I hope to spread that book to more so that people can have a better understanding of sharks and come together to stop the cruelty being done to these animals. This is a great book and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good and informative book. I rated this book ⅘ stars overall.