Leviathan selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Providence Journal. Leviathan was also chosen by Amazon.com's editors as one of the 10 best history books of 2007.

Eric Jay Dolin was awarded the 23rd annual (2007) L. Byrne Waterman Award, by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for outstanding contributions to whaling research and history, for the publication of Leviathan.

Leviathan named an Honors Book in nonfiction for the 8th annual Massachusetts Book Awards (2008-2009).

Leviathan won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History.

Leviathan awarded silver medal for history in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2008).

"The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation"

"I thought I learned everything I needed to know about whaling from Melville, but I was wrong. . . . The excitement of the stories in this magnificently researched saga build and build . . . I read every word."

"Mr. Dolin handles this long, complex tale with great skill, both as a historian and as a writer . . . Leviathan is thoroughly engaging even as American whaling is becalmed in the 20th century, a ghost of a once great American industry, perhaps the most romantic in the country's business history."

"Leviathan is an exhaustive, richly detailed history of industrial American whaling. . . . Dolin succeeds admirably at what he sets out to do: tell the story of one of the strangest industries in American history."