The Devil’s Teeth, by Susan Casey (Henry Holt, 2005)

Here’s a tip: read this book.

Bonus tip: Do yourself a favor and don’t read this book on the plane to Hawaii.

The Devil’s Teeth is a non-fiction account of great white sharks and the researchers who study them, and aside from the breathtaking fear I felt every time I got in the ocean after reading it, or perhaps because of that fear, the book made a great impression on me.

What I learned from Devil’s Teeth: only amateurs call them “great white sharks.” Researchers call them white sharks. Really. Can you imagine scientists adding adjectives to other species? Neat blue sharks. Splendid mako sharks. Wide nurse sharks. Not so much, right? Right.

I learned a lot more about great whites, which I fruitlessly applied during my Hawaii visit, but much of the wonder that Devil’s Teeth delivers comes from the fact that scientists know very little about white sharks. (“Great whites.”)

Susan Casey — former creative director for Outside magazine, former editor at Sports Illustrated, and current editor at Time — takes as her leaping-off point a BBC documentary, Great White Shark, which followed the research of two extraordinarily dedicated scientists working on the Farallones islands.

Those two researchers — Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson — discovered that the Farallones were a unique habitat for great whites. The two found that every fall, just 27 miles west of San Francisco, dozens of great whites gathered around the islands, feeding off the many flavors of seal that beached on the rocky islands. Far from being the solitary, lone hunters that the world imagined, the Farallones shark community showed that not only would the same sharks return year after year (or, in the case of female great whites, every other year), but that they would congregate and in the same territory — males on the southwest side of the islands, females on the northeast.

The sharks are the reason Casey followed this story (and she follows it to great lengths and for several years), but the Farallones themselves — crumbling, rocky outcroppings buried in unpredictable and destructive seas — are the devil’s teeth of the title. It’s the lure of these islands, off-limits to all but a handful of researchers, a safe haven for endangered species, that brings Casey to the hunt in the first place. Well, actually, a BBC documentary from 2000 put her on the trail, but after her first visit, Casey got hooked.

Devil’s Teeth is a riveting tale, with enough close encounters with sharks to keep you on edge, but it’s also a rich history of the Farallones islands, and a fascinating look at a unique location at a crucial time — while Casey is reporting Devil’s Teeth, the islands undergo major changes and increasing encroachment by tour guides and spectacle-hungry sightseers.

When Casey writes about the characters in Devil’s Teeth — human, animal and mineral alike — you can feel her passion for the story. It’s a classic piece of journalism, exhaustively researched, structured in a way that pulls you from chapter to chapter, and it’s a breeze and a joy to read. If we were in a book club, I’d have some beefs to raise about the last third of the book, but until you’ve read it, I’m not about to ruin the ending. So go pick it up, take a trip to Kansas or Wyoming or some other similarly land-locked locale, and rip through this book.