"Detailed, determinedly even-handed and often fascinating." - Lucy Atkins, The Times Literary Supplement
"Jason Colby's Orca...left me with feelings of gratitude for his hard work, admiration and envy for his skills as a historian and storyteller, and also some new hopes about the possibilities of writing about animals and history.....The characters, human and cetacean, are drawn with extraordinary empathy and care, and their experiences, hopes, and worries, as told by Colby, are powerful....The photographs, of which there are more than forty, are both exceptional and thoughtfully curated." - Nigel Rothfels, Humanimalia
"Timely ... Over forty oral history interviews, added to substantial archival and secondary research, allow Colby to weave a history that highlights the agency and complexities of orca capture and captivity ... This engaging book should garner a wide audience of academics and orca enthusiasts. The clear narrative and interesting stories moreover make it suitable for undergraduate courses in both Pacific Northwest history and environmental history" - Jen Corrinne Brown, American Historical Review
"Colby is an easy and engaging writer... He utilizes extensive interviews he conducted with many of the most colorful and important people involved in the story: those who captured whales, the promoters, fishermen, scientists, and the citizens and politicians who became involved in the fight to halt the capture." - Carmel Finley, Journal of American History
"An exhaustively researched and well-written account." - Paul Brown, Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine
"Colby is a real expert... Such expertise is necessary for his meticulous marshalling of material in Orca." - Charles Foster, Literary Review
"Compelling... a fascinating account." - Jon Dunn, BBC Wildlife
"[Colby] weaves into the narrative first-hand interviews with the sagas main players. The result is immersive and dramatic." - Sascha Hooker, Nature
"Immersive and dramatic ... Colby demonstrates the speed at which societal attitudes can also shift the baseline of our expectations. In this age of extinction, with ongoing changes in ocean chemistry and physics, it is the potential for a sea change in public attitude that presents hope." - Nature
"This is an affecting book, personal and political all at once, and written by a scholar who has worked hard to recover and relay painful tales of the wild orcas that encountered humans and the humans that did the encountering. Nearly all those meetings began in panic and pain, most of it the whales', though some of it that of the men who came to believe they were doing the wrong thing wresting these breathtaking animals from their world, to deliver them to our own—which has been changed by the resulting episodes of captivity and captivation." - D. Graham Burnett, author of The Sounding of the Whale
"This fascinating history reveals what happens when humans became captivated by captive orcas. Colby poignantly locates the very origins of conservation in the tense, tender, and tragic relationships between humans and cetaceans. This finely textured social history of the Pacific Northwest opens up the story of how 'killer whales'—once cast as deadly pests—became popular attractions and emotional, intelligent 'orcas'." - Daniel Bender, author of The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo
"With Orca, Jason Colby takes readers on a riveting journey. In a matter of decades, the Pacific Northwest's killer whales traveled from despised vermin to regional sweethearts. Their emotional passage revealed the true wildcard of wildlife management: navigating the swirling opinions of human populations. A timely book, Orca brings history to bear on a fraught relationship between two apex predators. Colby traces the rise in human affection for the whales but also the emergence of a cruel realization as audiences cheered captives' performances in aquariums across the globe. Love and fandom could kill and maim as efficiently as fear and contempt. In the end, it's unclear whether orcas benefited from the connection they forged with people." - Jon Coleman, author of Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
"Killer whales, or orcas—the apex marine predators—were once widely feared as dangerous vermin and were shot on sight. Yet over the past fifty years, a sea change in attitudes towards this remarkable animal took place, and today the species is a revered and cherished global icon of the wild marine environment. In this compelling book, Jason Colby chronicles this transition in our relationship with the killer whale and tells an enthralling story complete with drama and excitement. It is sure to be an important addition to the libraries of natural historians and whale enthusiasts alike." - John Ford, Pacific Biological Station, Fisheries and Oceans Canada
"Colby shines a light on how little we understand of these magnificent creatures. His book gives a glimpse into a mysterious yet strangely familiar world, brought to life in a story that's tragic, heartbreaking, and finally hopeful." - Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
"A revealing look at how the human view of orcas has changed... Colby persuasively contends that, despite legitimate concerns popularized by the 2013 documentary Blackfish, about the effects of captivity on orcas, the animals avoided extinction because their presence in accessible public venues enabled people to relate to them... Colby has produced an originally argued and accessibly jargon-free consideration of a hot-button animal conservation issue." - Publishers Weekly
"Killer whales, also known as orcas, are idolized, loved, and even revered. Such sentiments, however, have not always been held toward this species, as historian Jason Colby reveals in his new book, Orca... Colby does an excellent job of framing these events within the larger environmental movement of the time, as well as placing them within the context of the nationalism that was spreading on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border at the time." - Robin W. Baird, Science
