2009-06-30 22:26:04 -

LONDON (AP) - The story of a man's lifelong obsession with whales won Britain's leading nonfiction book prize Tuesday.
«Leviathan, or The Whale,» by British writer Philip Hoare, beat five other finalists to the 20,000-pound ($33,000) Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction.
Inspired by Herman Melville's whale-hunting saga «Moby-Dick,» Hoare traces his fascination with the gigantic sea creatures from childhood visits to the Natural History Museum to journeys across the world's oceans.
U.S. journalist Jacob Weisberg, who led the five-judge panel, said Hoare's passion for his subject was infectious and his dreamlike prose «rises to the condition of literature.
Named in honor of the 18th-century essayist and lexicographer, the Samuel Johnson Prize is open to English-language books from any country in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.

The other finalists were Liaquat Ahamed's credit-crunch tale «Lords of Finance»; Ben Goldacre's myth-debunking «Bad Science»; David Grann's story of Amazon exploration, «The Lost City of Z»; «Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality,» by Manjit Kumar; and «The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science,» by Richard Holmes.
On the Net: www.thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk