The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead is a collection of essays about a series of deaths personal to the author.  Madison Davis writes about the tragic and unexpected deaths of her cousin and brother, a long illness resulting in the death of her father and an uncle killed in action.  The writing is cathartic and reflective with many thoughts on death, grief, processing emotions and being left behind. The first story, the double murder of the author's cousin and friend, was surprising, terrible and deeply absorbing, pulling my attention right away.  From there, the differences in how Madison and her family dealt with the deaths of other family members is observed with outcomes of tragedy, relief and humor. If you are someone who has ever lost a person close to you, you are sure to find something relatable and empathetic in Madison's contemplations.  Some thoughts that I felt were deeply comforting and worth contemplating include Madison's thoughts on an overgrown cemetery:

It's a place where the earth has gently, but powerfully, overwritten our sense of death and life as being experienced by an individual.  It's where human desire to memorialize the dead meets nature's ambivalence toward that need.

As well as overcoming intense grief: 
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I tell her to remember that we move through it.  Sometimes with great effort- but remember that we do.
 
This book was received for free in return for an honest review. 

​In 2015, Tom Mustill went on a kayak sightseeing adventure of a lifetime.  Off the coast of California in a two-person kayak, Tom was able to see a humpback whale breach- right on top of him.  Lucky to survive, Tom, a wildlife filmmaker, began to look deeper into his experience.  Several onlookers caught the breach on their phones.  After looking at grainy footage, Tom seemed to agree that the whale seemed to change course in the air.  This led him to a series of questions: did the whale change course on purpose?  Can whales communicate with humans?  and how?  From these questions, Tom dove into the science of language, animal communication and cetacean behavior and biology. 

Tom's journey into whale communication goes down many different paths, eventually converging into the many reasons we should protect these amazing mammals of the ocean.  Written with many personal stories and anecdotes sprinkled throughout with science, How To Speak Whale, is an easy and entertaining read for any whale lover. Beginning with human interaction with whales and answering the question of why we might want to study these amazing creatures. This leads to whale biology and the organs and methods that whales use to communicate with one another. I have always loved whale songs and I was amazed with the complexity of their vocal organs as well as how scientists get to study them. From there, Tom dives into the study of animal language and the amazing jumps in learning that we have taken to understand the other animal species around us. Technology and artificial intelligence have been a huge help in assisting humans to understand animal language and sound.  This technology has the ability to hear and recognize patterns and sounds that humans can't hear and is helping scientists as well as the average person learn and appreciate more about animals every day.  Overall, humans still don't know how to completely speak whale, but we have learned that whales may know more about communicating with us than we realize.