Presenting himself as a hapless innocent — all “I had no intention” and “I certainly never expected” — Hohn guides us expertly through the swirling currents of his own psyche, upon which so much of this book’s considerable charm depends. We learn that the author is not really cut out to chase ducks: he’s “a weakling with a bad back,” asthmatic, myopic, afraid of heights and sharks. Swimming in deep water off Hawaii inspires in him a terror that passes only after he scampers — “You might think that it would be impossible to scamper in flippers, but I can attest otherwise” — back aboard the catamaran, where he stays. Triumphant in the intellectual realm, the author quivers at, and makes great comedy of, physical danger. At one point, he hydroplanes around a slippery deck in a nighttime North Atlantic gale, sleep-deprived, hypothermic and soaked to the skin while wrestling heavy equipment and absorbing the curses of a crew boss. The nightmare ends with vomit and a 14-hour sleep.  Over and again, Hohn returns (like Melville) to the themes of memory, childhood and impending fatherhood. He ruminates upon the relationship between seeing and knowing (standing at a taffrail, he enjoys “the reunion of a thing and its word”), and the problem of translating words to images and images, like maps, into words. In following the ducks’ illusory trail, he writes, “I’ve strived to raise, if only by a megapixel or two, the resolution of my own mental model of the world.”  Why does this sort of imagining matter? Because how we imagine a place determines, among other things, how we value it, and therefore how far we may go to “save” it. In the case of trashed beaches, salvation comes either through back-end activities like feel-good citizen cleanups or, more promisingly, front-end policies that cut our use of nonessential plastics. At this point in Hohn’s narrative, the ducks aren’t a symbol or a metaphor. They are pure pollution, allowing him to deliver a nuanced critique of such cleanups and a sharp analysis of the public relations, or make-believe, behind them.  “Moby-Duck” succeeds as harebrained adventure, as a cautionary environmental tale, as a deconstruction of consumer demand, and as a meditation on wilderness and imagination. Hohn moves easily between the micro and the macro, weaving personal histories into science and industry as he roams. In the Harper’s manner, he luxuriates in extended descriptions (which sometimes spill into lengthy endnotes) of objects, oddballs and his reactions to everything he sees. Listening to an oceanographer expound, in his organic garden, on zero-waste policies and closed-loop manufacturing, Hohn writes, “My upbringing in Northern California had taught me to distrust utopian strangers who talked about ‘economic paradigms,’ no matter how tasty their bananas.” In a Chinese toy factory, he pulls a 16-year-old duck from his pocket and fits the toy into its original mold. “For a moment I half expect some sort of cosmic magic to occur — rays of yellow light to come shooting from the mold, a portal to open in the space-time continuum. Instead, I just stand there muttering, idiotically, ‘Wow. . . Wow.’ ”  At times, I reacted similarly to “Moby-Duck.” Hohn seems to have it all: deep intelligence, a strikingly original voice, humility and a hunger to suss out everything a yellow duck may literally or metaphorically touch. Naturally, he can’t, but the chase is, after all, the thing.  The True Story of 28,800 Bath ToysLost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them  Elizabeth Royte’s latest book is “Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water.”  A version of this review appears in print on March 6, 2011, on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Toys at Sea. Today's Paper|Subscribe
A journalist on an ocean quest for 28,800 rubber ducks lost at sea discovers where they came from, where they drifted, and why.