The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's G reat White Sharks

US: Holt Paperbacks, 2006. Paperback. Good. Journalist Susan Casey joins a strange band of surfer-scientists on a remot e island off the California coast for some close encounters with the jaws o f the world's most mysterious and fearsome predators in the New York Times bestseller, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks. Susan Casey was in her living room when she first saw the great white shark s of the Farallon Islands, their dark fins swirling around a small motorboa t in a documentary. These sharks were the alphas among alphas, some longer than twenty feet, and there were too many to count; even more incredible, t his congregation was taking place just twenty-seven miles off the coast of San Francisco. In a matter of months, Casey was being hoisted out of the early-winter swel ls on a crane, up a cliff face to the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island-dubbed by sailors in the 1850s the "devil's teeth." There she joined Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle, the two biologists who bunk down during shar k season each fall in the island's one habitable building, a haunted, 135-y ear-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Two days later, she got her first glimpse of the famous, terrifying jaws up close and she was insta ntly hooked; her fascination soon yielded to obsession-and an invitation to return for a full season. But as Casey readied herself for the eight-week stint, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the danger ous, forgotten islands that have banished every campaign for civilization i n the past two hundred years. The Devil's Teeth is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a.