Skip to content

Opening book details…

Can I read The Ahab's Rolling Sea: a Natural History of Moby-dick on EtoBox?

The Ahab's Rolling Sea: a Natural History of Moby-dick by Richard J. King is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Ahab's Rolling Sea: a Natural History of Moby-dick about?

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 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 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 Mel

Who reads The Ahab's Rolling Sea: a Natural History of Moby-dick?

It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.

Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.

Author
Richard J. King
Publisher
The University of Chicago press
Published
2019
Language
EN
ISBN
9780226515014
Category
nonfiction
Subjects
Literary Fiction, Nature, History

More by Richard J. King

Browse all works by Richard J. King

Similar books