Book excerpt: The oil spill disaster that occurred when the Exxon Valdez ran aground has become part of the iconography of ecological disaster. This book synthesizes previously confidential data only recently released by the U.S. government. The data concerns the effects of this nightmarish spill on marine mammals, such as sea otters, harbor seals, killer whales, and humpback whales. Because many of the book's contributors were on site within 24 hours of this 11 million gallon catastrophe, the book is a unique longitudinal study of the demise of an ecosystem due to a single acute environmental perturbation.These certain-to-be-influential results reported here should assist marine biologists, pathologists, toxicologists, environmentalists, engineers, and coastal planners in assessing the nature of this now legendary disaster.