Greg Skomal wants to get one thing out of the way at the beginning of his shark memoir. Yes, he may be the celebrity scientist you’ve seen on Shark Week, “but I’m still just a biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.”

Still, Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark, written with Ret Talbot, dramatically recounts how Skomal went from a shy research assistant at the Apex Predators Program right here in Narragansett to becoming “the Paul McCartney of marine biology.”

The story begins in 2018, with Skomal leading a shark-watching tour out of Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the same time, we meet Arthur Medici and Isaac Rocha, two boogie boarders who have come to surf the Cape Cod National Seashore. We also meet the young shark swimming along the beaches of the outer Cape, hunting for seals in the same area where the men are surfing.

The stories alternate, with Skomal’s sharkophiles impatient to see their first white shark, while a few miles away, Arthur coaches his young protégé. Soon, Skomal points out a white shark to the delight of the passengers, just as his cell phone begins to vibrate. It’s the media, calling to ask about the fatal shark attack that just took Arthur’s life.

 That moment—where Skomal has to balance his enthusiasm for white sharks with his responsibility to keep the public safe—underscores the primary tension of the book.

Over the course of Skomal’s career, white sharks went from feared but rarely seen “man-eaters” to a beloved and protected species. Recently, however, increasing attacks on humans in Cape Cod waters have put him in the midst of controversy fueled by these competing views of sharks.

Skomal, who had cultivated media deals to supplement his limited government research funding in return for footage of him tagging sharks, was now being accused by some of caring more about sharks than human life.

While local government leaders debated the merits of shark deterrents and ultimately spend $50,000 to find out what Skomal already knew—i.e., that the deterrents were expensive and unreliable—Skomal forges a plan to study sharks even more deeply, getting near real-time data that he hopes will give scientists a fine-scale understanding of shark behavior so they can better predict when sharks may pose a danger to humans.

Those studies are ongoing now, the culmination of Skomal’s years of tagging sharks with progressively more high-tech tags that have given researchers unprecedented insights into how and where sharks migrate, feed, and reproduce.

The book takes us back to the beginning for Skomal, when watching Jaws set him on his life’s course. We learn about his development as a shark researcher, his reverence for his mentors and colleagues, and how, despite years on the ocean tagging over 300 sharks, he never loses his sense of awe at these encounters. Skomal, the shark-scientist-next-door, writes,

“I’d rather be the kind of guy you just want to grab a beer with.” And while you’re at it, he might tell you about how he survived a near drowning when a white shark entangled in the buoys supporting his diving cage, or tracked sharks with an underwater SharkCam, or took blood samples from a 2,000-pound, live shark writhing on the platform of a ship.