Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I did not find Sy Montgomery to be a good writer. I struggled to finish the book. I agree with the other one star reviews. Considering the amount of time I spent reading this book, I did not learn a lot of new information about the octopus. A lot of the book reads like a diary. I learned more than I wanted to about Sy's friends, hopes,dreams, and body aches. Example: "Marion has been missing for a few weeks from our Wonderful Wednesdays, plagued with headaches. But one week she surprises us with happy news: she's getting married. We've met her brown-haired, bespectacled beau, Dave Lepzelter, a postdoc in biophysics at Boston University, who loves Star Wars, their nine pet rats, and the anacondas. They haven't set the wedding date yet, but they have selected the officiant: Scott, Marion's hero and mentor." If you find that bit of writing as tiresome and mind-numbing as I do, then do not buy this book. But what disturbed me most about this book, and the reason I gave it one star, is the prevailing misperception that people have the right to keep octopuses captive against their will, deprive them of a natural fulfilling life, even kill them, while the whole time maintaining how much they love the octopus. Here are some examples: Sy describes Ken Wong as a "shipper" of octopuses. One octopus, later named Karma, tried to jet away from Ken in the ocean, but he caught her in his net. Taken from the ocean, Ken put Karma in a 5x5x4 foot tank. Ken says "I love them all" and has "no regrets" about capturing wild free octopuses and then subjecting them to a risky transport (which could kill some of them) followed by a solitary life in a small prison. He justifies it by saying that the captive octopus will live a "long, good life." How many people would choose to live 100 years in prison instead of 80 years as a free human being? Not me. This attitude of being insensitive to the autonomy of an octopus is pervasive in the book. It reminds me of the elk and duck hunters who loudly proclaim how much they "love" ducks, elk, and nature and then kill, maim, and blast the same animals with gleeful abandon. In one chapter, an octopus named Kali escapes from a tank at the aquarium at night and dies on the floor. The aquarium staff are sad and cry, but they do not seem to own their responsibility for the death of this animal that they stole from the ocean and kept captive. What is worse, these people recognize the intelligence and emotional capacity of the octopus and still keep it prisoner in a small tank that in no way approximates the stimulation and full life that an octopus would experience in its natural environment. One octopus handler named Andrew was described in this way: "When all the fish in his tank turned up dead, he didn't cry, but instead asked his mom to borrow her scissors so he could dissect the corpses and find out what went wrong." Sy casually comments that "Octopuses who have been experimentally blinded navigate flawlessly using their sense of touch and taste." How about some sense of outrage at this treatment of living feeling animals? Amazingly Sy writes, "I longed to return to the ocean to watch octopuses where their choices would be as limitless as the sea. Come summer, I would have a chance to get my wish." It is too bad that all of the octopuses held captive in aquariums, dead on aquarium floors or in shipping containers, didn't get their wish.