Book review: ‘Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks’

One way or another, sharks do make an impression. Whether it’s those formidable teeth — long before “awesome” became an all-purpose adjective, they were regularly referred to as that — or their mythic importance, sharks are not something people are neutral about. Which is perhaps why they occupy such a special place in popular culture.

And while everybody may think “Jaws,” Juliet Eilperin roams more expansively. In her picaresque book, “Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks” she uses Woody Allen to reference perhaps their most mythic attribute: “A relationship, I think, is like a shark,” she quotes Alvy Singer in “Annie Hall.” “…It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

As a national environmental reporter for the Washington Post, Eilperin has at her fingertips the apt scientific term “ram ventilation” for this phenomenon that gives them “no choice but to swim at all times, with their mouths agape, in order to obtain the oxygen they need to survive. This is one of the reasons people see sharks as so scary: cruising along as they display their sharp teeth, they look as if they’re poised to attack at any moment.” Already you can see what makes this such a compelling book: Its author not only knows all about her subject but she knows how readers think about it.

Eilperin has traveled the world, from Mexico to Africa in search of these creatures, their habitats, their ways and their uses. She visits Hong Kong, mecca for aficionados of that supreme (and highly controversial because of environmental concerns) delicacy, shark fin soup, and, in the Indian Ocean near the southernmost tip of the African continent, gets in a cage to experience great whites up close and personal. Well, fortunately for her, not quite as personal as a nearby tuna head being used as bait on a sightseeing expedition: “the shark’s teeth are jagged, and it manages to snatch a bit of the head before shoving off.” As a fellow occupant of the cage remarks to her, “if they didn’t demonize it, we wouldn’t have come,” but the main impression left by “Demon Fish” is that sharks are indeed all they are cracked up to be — and more.

Yes, they swim fast and look as if they’re coming to get you, but it’s those teeth, which come on a kind of conveyor belt replacing broken or lost ones, that actually make them so scary. Eilperin does not neglect the form and function that make them such formidable creatures:

“While sharks share a similar jaw structure across different species, modern sharks each take on their own bite sizes — and shapes. A shark’s choppers depend both on the species and the age of the animal, since different types of teeth are effective for various types of prey. Saw-edged teeth, like the kind great whites have, come in handy when biting big chunks out of marine mammals. Baby great whites, by contrast, have pointed teeth that let them grab and swallow smaller prey.”

As I can attest from personal experience. Fishing from a jetty not many miles from where Eilperin descended in her shark cage, I caught one of those baby great whites. Although it was still in very early infancy — it was no bigger than a large bullfrog — its teeth were its most remarkable feature, needle thin at their points but sharp beyond belief. Although it is more than half a century since that summer day, I have never forgotten its formidable features nor the magnetic qualities of its very bloody flesh, which when cut up for bait attracted to my line all manner of fish anxious to get their revenge against this world-class predator. Even if “Demon Fish” cannot summon up childhood memories for all its readers, it can pass along a very palpable sense of what the fuss is all about.

Rubin is the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”