In prose that varies in tone from reflective to unaffectedly cool to delightfully wide-eyed (“hat misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart?”), the author follows in the wake of a half-dozen Virgils on a tour through driftology, oceanography, environmental degradation and the economics of toy-making. Could it have made it through the Northwest Passage? Thus began Hohn’s pursuit for an answer. Ten years later, a yellow rubber duck of the same manufacture, barnacled and tortured by the elements, washed ashore in Maine.

Among the lost items were thousands of rubber toys. In 1992, a crate toppled off a container ship and dumped much of its cargo into the Pacific Ocean. Believe it or not, “what Melville did for whaling, Hohn has done for plastic bath toys lost at sea.A finely spun chronicle of the wide-ranging quest to track the wanderings of a rubber duck lost at sea, from Harper’s senior editor Hohn. But his book is so “alive with intellectual curiosity,” that hardly matters. Occasionally, he drifts too far from the toy spill, said Rob Verger in The Boston Globe. He balances abstract contemplations with wonderful instances of “self-aware humor.” Once, when he tells a woman in a bar in Alaska about his quest, she pulls up the hood of his yellow raincoat and demands he quack. The “unique pleasure” of Hohn’s story is how much else he’s able to sneak in, said Kristin Thiel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Standing on trash-strewn beaches in Alaska and cruising through a floating garbage patch off Hawaii, Hohn contemplates the 6.4 million tons of waste spilled by container ships each year and has competing worries: What good are localized cleanups, and do plastic particles really become more toxic to sea life the longer they degrade? Visiting the factory in China where the lost ducks were produced, he’s awed to be able to press a 15-year-old castaway toy into its original mold but alert enough to notice that he’s stepped into a workplace scene that could be 1930s America.

Who knew that chasing an armada of tiny ducks could result in such a “thought-provoking” work? said Dustin Michael Harris in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn