Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick
Richard J. King
(Author)
Description
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 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.
Product Details
Price
$38.40
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Publish Date
November 11, 2019
Pages
464
Dimensions
6.1 X 9.1 X 1.4 inches | 1.7 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780226514963
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Richard J. King is visiting associate professor of maritime literature and history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. For more than twenty years he has been sailing and teaching aboard tall ships in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He writes and illustrates a column on marine animals for Sea History magazine, edits the "Searchable Sea Literature" website, and was the founding series editor of Seafaring America. He is the author of Lobster and The Devil's Cormorant: A Natural History. For more information, visit http: //www.richardjking.info/.
Reviews
"I'm an easy mark for books like Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of 'Moby-Dick, ' which I've read a perhaps unhealthy number of times, in light of Annie Dillard's opinion that Melville's baggy masterpiece is the 'best book ever written about nature.' Focusing on nineteenth century oceanography, natural history, and, of course, the whalers' understanding of his prey's remarkable intelligence, King's book is a fascinating and rare thing: a vital addition to Melville studies."--Stephen Sparks "LitHub, 12 Books You Should Read This October"
"King uses modern sources and historical texts to take a fresh look at Melville's book--published in the same decade as Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species--with the well-defined brief of assessing its natural history content. The result is a lighthearted and incredibly enjoyable read that manages somehow, at the right moments, to be both broad and narrow in scope. It should be required reading for anyone attempting Moby-Dick. . . . No captive of the library, King is an experienced seaman and an open-minded and intrepid guide. A visiting associate professor of maritime literature and history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, he is willing to pull on his old Sou'wester and sail into the watery part of the world. . . . King writes ably and in scholarly detail about albatrosses, ambergris, baleen, barnacles, seals, sharks, sperm whale behavior and language, swordfish, typhoons, and all sorts of marine and cetological marginalia. . . . [A] talented and clear-eyed . . . writer."--Christopher J. Kemp "Science"
"A treasure trove. King situates Melville as a person of his time, writing amid a quickening pace of discoveries about the natural world but, pre-On the Origin of Species, inclined to couch them as further disclosures of God's design."--Stephen Phillips "Spectator"
"Ahab's Rolling Sea highlights our destructiveness as it teases fact from fiction in Moby-Dick, the obsessive hunt for a great white whale. . . . Rigorous. . . . Original."--Chris Simms "New Scientist"
"King gives us natural history done Melville-style, looking over a ship's rail, and this ingenious focus neatly weds field science and literary history, yielding a study that is fresh, provocative, and welcome."--William Howarth "American Scholar"
"Ultimately, answering these questions involves poetry more than science. Melville has combined the rational, objective, Darwinian perspective with the emotional, poetic, Emersonian perspective, pushing the reader to see nature as both dangerous and damaged. Here is King's main point: that Melville's novel can now be read as an introduction to environmental issues of the twenty-first century."--John P. Loonam "Washington Independent Review of Books"
"A rather schematic structure--Ahab's Rolling Sea could be used as a reference book, a zoological concordance to Moby-Dick--is combined with a genuinely gripping retelling of the tale."--Brian Morton "Times Literary Supplement" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"Herman Melville's sprawling masterpiece Moby-Dick is a fictional feat studded with empirical evidence, reveals maritime historian King in this invigorating study. King traces references to ethology, meteorology, marine microbiota and the oceans to Melville's sailing experience in the Pacific and wranglings with the works of scientists William Scoresby, Louis Agassiz and others. Moby-Dick, King boldly avers, is a 'proto-Darwinian fable'--and its beleaguered narrator, Ishmael, an early environmentalist."--John P. Loonam "Nature"
"This examination of Moby-Dick as nature writing could be a sneaky way to get the English majors on your shopping list to read about science."--John P. Loonam "American Scientist" (12/11/2019 12:00:00 AM)
"King reflects on what we have learned and lost from the oceans since Melville's time. He answers questions many readers surely ponder. . . . Naturally, the book is full of spoilers. Read Moby-Dick, read this, then read Moby-Dick again."--John P. Loonam "BBC Wildlife" (12/11/2019 12:00:00 AM)
"King, a visiting associate professor of maritime literature and history (what a fascinating title this is!), runs after the Leviathan of literary semantics in the most imaginative way: testing what Melville and people of his era knew about their natural environment, maritime ecosystems, birds, cetaceans, and whales before he published Moby-Dick in 1851. . . . King does his best not to be another Ahab seeing his 'White Whale' escaping. And he actually makes it: from the detailed research of the marine fauna to the possible influences of Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Bowditch on Melville. This is the retelling of Moby-Dick from an imaginative point of view: from the Pequod towards the cosmos surrounding us in the era of new environmentalism."--Dimitris Doulgeridis "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"Anyone who loves Moby-Dick should read this book."--Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and Why Read 'Moby-Dick'? "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"It took me decades to appreciate that Melville's messy, uncontainable, surging Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest book ever written about the sea, and about the human relationship with the living world, and perhaps the only book sufficiently un-jaded by mercantilism and modernity to be worthy of the actual ocean itself in all its raw, uncontrollable, surging majesty. But if you don't want to wait decades for Melville's magnificence to be revealed, you can cheat and read King's book. Ahab's Rolling Sea is a marvelous guide to the magic and mystery that was Melville's gift to us, for King reveals the deep, deep backstory of the making of Moby-Dick, the vast pots of experience and information that Melville simmered down, and even the missing ingredients of his age, that made Moby-Dick the richest bouillabaisse in all of literature. Oh, and about Melville's missing ingredients--they're here, in King's terrific book."--Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"Ahab's Rolling Sea is a wide-ranging, highly personal, richly eclectic, and extremely well-researched book whose style and humor, combined with its rigor, suggest the potential for popularity even beyond the fascinations of this self-confessed whalehead. Who could not warm to a chapter titled 'Gulls, Sea-Ravens, and Albatrosses' or 'Sword-Fish and Lively Grounds, ' or be intrigued by 'Phosphorescence'? There's a Melvillean romance here, and it sits especially well with King's love and empathy for human as well as natural history. A contemporary, witty, almost postmodern field guide."--Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, The Sea Inside, The Whale, and Leviathan "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"King decisively settles any lingering questions about Moby-Dick, nineteenth-century whales and whaling, and all lore and literature of the sea. More than establishing a factual basis for Ishmael's fiction-making, King writes passionately on climate change, economic pressures on sea creatures, and the future Melville confronts in his marvelous encounter with the 'wonder-world' of whaling. King's deep knowledge grounds lively storytelling, keen observations drawn from years of sailing, and an eye for details that will make Melville's book come alive. But even if you haven't read Moby-Dick, you will revel in this storehouse of fascinating tales and arcana, from Ambergris to Zeuglodon. A treasure for library, classroom, or bedside table."--Wyn Kelley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York and Herman Melville: An Introduction "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"This is a superb work of popular scholarship that rivals the best books of maritime nonfiction currently in print. For any teacher, reader, or aficionado of Melville's magnum opus the present work will be a joy to read; for anyone curious about the current state of the marine environment, this book will be eye-opening."--Dan Brayton, Middlebury College, author of "Shakespeare's Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration" "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"King uses modern sources and historical texts to take a fresh look at Melville's book--published in the same decade as Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species--with the well-defined brief of assessing its natural history content. The result is a lighthearted and incredibly enjoyable read that manages somehow, at the right moments, to be both broad and narrow in scope. It should be required reading for anyone attempting Moby-Dick. . . . No captive of the library, King is an experienced seaman and an open-minded and intrepid guide. A visiting associate professor of maritime literature and history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, he is willing to pull on his old Sou'wester and sail into the watery part of the world. . . . King writes ably and in scholarly detail about albatrosses, ambergris, baleen, barnacles, seals, sharks, sperm whale behavior and language, swordfish, typhoons, and all sorts of marine and cetological marginalia. . . . [A] talented and clear-eyed . . . writer."--Christopher J. Kemp "Science"
"A treasure trove. King situates Melville as a person of his time, writing amid a quickening pace of discoveries about the natural world but, pre-On the Origin of Species, inclined to couch them as further disclosures of God's design."--Stephen Phillips "Spectator"
"Ahab's Rolling Sea highlights our destructiveness as it teases fact from fiction in Moby-Dick, the obsessive hunt for a great white whale. . . . Rigorous. . . . Original."--Chris Simms "New Scientist"
"King gives us natural history done Melville-style, looking over a ship's rail, and this ingenious focus neatly weds field science and literary history, yielding a study that is fresh, provocative, and welcome."--William Howarth "American Scholar"
"Ultimately, answering these questions involves poetry more than science. Melville has combined the rational, objective, Darwinian perspective with the emotional, poetic, Emersonian perspective, pushing the reader to see nature as both dangerous and damaged. Here is King's main point: that Melville's novel can now be read as an introduction to environmental issues of the twenty-first century."--John P. Loonam "Washington Independent Review of Books"
"A rather schematic structure--Ahab's Rolling Sea could be used as a reference book, a zoological concordance to Moby-Dick--is combined with a genuinely gripping retelling of the tale."--Brian Morton "Times Literary Supplement" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"Herman Melville's sprawling masterpiece Moby-Dick is a fictional feat studded with empirical evidence, reveals maritime historian King in this invigorating study. King traces references to ethology, meteorology, marine microbiota and the oceans to Melville's sailing experience in the Pacific and wranglings with the works of scientists William Scoresby, Louis Agassiz and others. Moby-Dick, King boldly avers, is a 'proto-Darwinian fable'--and its beleaguered narrator, Ishmael, an early environmentalist."--John P. Loonam "Nature"
"This examination of Moby-Dick as nature writing could be a sneaky way to get the English majors on your shopping list to read about science."--John P. Loonam "American Scientist" (12/11/2019 12:00:00 AM)
"King reflects on what we have learned and lost from the oceans since Melville's time. He answers questions many readers surely ponder. . . . Naturally, the book is full of spoilers. Read Moby-Dick, read this, then read Moby-Dick again."--John P. Loonam "BBC Wildlife" (12/11/2019 12:00:00 AM)
"King, a visiting associate professor of maritime literature and history (what a fascinating title this is!), runs after the Leviathan of literary semantics in the most imaginative way: testing what Melville and people of his era knew about their natural environment, maritime ecosystems, birds, cetaceans, and whales before he published Moby-Dick in 1851. . . . King does his best not to be another Ahab seeing his 'White Whale' escaping. And he actually makes it: from the detailed research of the marine fauna to the possible influences of Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Bowditch on Melville. This is the retelling of Moby-Dick from an imaginative point of view: from the Pequod towards the cosmos surrounding us in the era of new environmentalism."--Dimitris Doulgeridis "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"Anyone who loves Moby-Dick should read this book."--Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and Why Read 'Moby-Dick'? "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"It took me decades to appreciate that Melville's messy, uncontainable, surging Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest book ever written about the sea, and about the human relationship with the living world, and perhaps the only book sufficiently un-jaded by mercantilism and modernity to be worthy of the actual ocean itself in all its raw, uncontrollable, surging majesty. But if you don't want to wait decades for Melville's magnificence to be revealed, you can cheat and read King's book. Ahab's Rolling Sea is a marvelous guide to the magic and mystery that was Melville's gift to us, for King reveals the deep, deep backstory of the making of Moby-Dick, the vast pots of experience and information that Melville simmered down, and even the missing ingredients of his age, that made Moby-Dick the richest bouillabaisse in all of literature. Oh, and about Melville's missing ingredients--they're here, in King's terrific book."--Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"Ahab's Rolling Sea is a wide-ranging, highly personal, richly eclectic, and extremely well-researched book whose style and humor, combined with its rigor, suggest the potential for popularity even beyond the fascinations of this self-confessed whalehead. Who could not warm to a chapter titled 'Gulls, Sea-Ravens, and Albatrosses' or 'Sword-Fish and Lively Grounds, ' or be intrigued by 'Phosphorescence'? There's a Melvillean romance here, and it sits especially well with King's love and empathy for human as well as natural history. A contemporary, witty, almost postmodern field guide."--Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, The Sea Inside, The Whale, and Leviathan "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"King decisively settles any lingering questions about Moby-Dick, nineteenth-century whales and whaling, and all lore and literature of the sea. More than establishing a factual basis for Ishmael's fiction-making, King writes passionately on climate change, economic pressures on sea creatures, and the future Melville confronts in his marvelous encounter with the 'wonder-world' of whaling. King's deep knowledge grounds lively storytelling, keen observations drawn from years of sailing, and an eye for details that will make Melville's book come alive. But even if you haven't read Moby-Dick, you will revel in this storehouse of fascinating tales and arcana, from Ambergris to Zeuglodon. A treasure for library, classroom, or bedside table."--Wyn Kelley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York and Herman Melville: An Introduction "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"This is a superb work of popular scholarship that rivals the best books of maritime nonfiction currently in print. For any teacher, reader, or aficionado of Melville's magnum opus the present work will be a joy to read; for anyone curious about the current state of the marine environment, this book will be eye-opening."--Dan Brayton, Middlebury College, author of "Shakespeare's Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration" "TA NEA (Greece)" (1/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
