It was as if the currents and the toys had drawn a trail for me to follow. Deftly weaving literature, science, journalism, philosophy, the history of out-the-way locales, arcane skills like canoe building, and no small number of family secrets, Donovan Hohn offers with The Inner Coast a humane view of a world that, as Ernest Hemingway said, is a fine place worth fighting for. But I think the single thing that turned my flights of fancy into a multi-year adventure and into a book was a map I received from oceanographers in Seattle on which they'd charted where the toys had been found and where they were likely to go. When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys. And while you always sense his outrage about. And there was something both riddling and enchanting about the images that swam into my brain-of yellow duckies out there on the deep, or traversing the Arctic. Hohns accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive dealings of. and Donovan Hohn Donovan Hohn's prose is as immaculate and quotable as that of any writer of his generation. I'd never heard of containers falling off ships.

But the simpler answer is that when I stumbled on the story of the bath toys lost at sea, the version of it I stumbled on raised more questions than it answered. I could also blame certain living writers I admire. Sometimes I blame Herman Melville, who made me want to do what Ishmael sets out to do-'sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.' Sometimes I blame my upbringing on the shores of San Francisco Bay, which for a while made me want to be a marine biologist when I grew up. Donovan Hohn: There are many different answers to that question.

Donovan hohn