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Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011)

by Nathaniel Philbrick(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0670022993 (ISBN13: 9780670022991)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Viking Adult

review 1: I have not read Moby Dick. I don't know why, I need to. This small little 127 pages book is fascinating. Philbrick has done a great deal of research about Melville which makes me WANT to read Moby Dick. Philbrick says: "I am not one of those purists who insist on reading the entire untruncated texts at all costs. Moby Dick is a long book, and time is short…the important things is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to fell the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book's composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say" (9). I feel like I am in a Melville college course with Philbrick as my professor. His insights and writing are though provoking.
review 2: This is an exc... moreellent and infectiously enthusiastic slim book (long essay?) that delivers more than the answer to its title. I'd recommend it to anyone who read and was bored with Moby-Dick in high school but is curious about reading it again without a stodgy English teacher looking over your shoulder. Or, someone who is halfway through Moby-Dick and is thinking "wha?"This lightly-critical work provides a quick-paced primer to the historical and biographical contexts in which Moby-Dick was written, as well as a more-fun-than-SparkNotes pointer to particularly powerful passages and very brief summaries. Don't expect a chapter-by-chapter guide from this, but it does give you a good sense of the plot, relevant characters, and deeper-than-ENG101-themes. Also, don't expect an academic journal essay with all the secondary source/literature review citation bells and whistles: this is a Penguin book, not an essay in The Leviathan. The only reason I gave it 4-stars is that I'm not a fan of overly-biographical readings of literature and somewhat disagree with the degree of importance Philbrick gives to the looming Civil War. But, then again, I also wish the book were longer: it had the effect of listening to a professor who truly loves his or her subject and expresses it with reading passages aloud replete with animated gestures and imitating character voices. To its credit, the work capitalizes on a sense of scholarly adventure that parallels the adventure of its subject. And I'm a sucker for that sort of fully-absorbed scholarly Indiana Jonesing. less

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