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Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of 'MobyDick',Used
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Although Herman Melvilles MobyDick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writingor even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prizewinning author Annie Dillard avers MobyDick is the best book ever written about nature, and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmaels sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851.A revelation for MobyDick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahabs Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melvilles novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crows nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahabs and Ishmaels worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melvilles narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism.Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahabs Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deepfrom whale hunters to climate refugees.
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This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.
For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.