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Ahab's Rolling Sea - A Natural History of "Moby-Dick" (Hardcover)
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Ahab's Rolling Sea - A Natural History of "Moby-Dick" (Hardcover)
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Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most
profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider
it a work of nature writing--or even a novel of the sea. Yet
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick 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, Ishmael's sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing
of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did far 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 Moby-Dick devotees and
neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey
through the natural history of Melville's 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 mid-1800s,
exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to
serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow's nest, setting
Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in
1851--at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just
before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares
Ahab's and Ishmael's 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
Melville's 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, Ahab's Rolling Sea
offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its
author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny
deep--from whale hunters to climate refugees.
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