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Although Herman Melvilles 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, 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 Moby-Dick 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 mid-1800s, 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 1851 - at 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 deep - from whale hunters to climate refugees.



About the Author

Richard J. King

Richard J. King is the author of "Lobster," acclaimed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and "The Devil's Cormorant: A Natural History," selected as a top-five science book of the year by Library Journal and short-listed for the ASLE Creative Book Award. He also is the author and illustrator of the memoir "Meeting Tom Brady." Most recently he is the author of "Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick," released this fall 2019. King is series editor for Seafaring America with UP New England, edits the "Searchable Sea Literature" website, and has published widely on maritime topics in scholarly and popular magazines. He writes and illustrates a regular column on animals for the kids' section of Sea History magazine and is a visiting professor at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, MA. For more, please see "www.richardjking.info"



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