num_pages: 131
description: Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest of the Great American Novels yet its length and esoteric subject matter create an aura of difficulty that too often keeps readers at bay. Fortunately one unabashed fan wants passionately to give Melville's masterpiece the broad contemporary audience it deserves. In his National Book Award-winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea Nathaniel Philbrick captivatingly unpacked the story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex the real-life incident that inspired Melville to write Moby-Dick. Now he sets his sights on the fiction itself offering a cabin master's tour of a spellbinding novel rich with adventure and history. Philbrick skillfully navigates Melville's world and illuminates the book's humor and unforgettable charactersfinding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and indeed to all times. A perfect match between author and subject Why Read Moby-Dick? gives us a renewed appreciation of both Melville and the proud seaman's town of Nantucket that Philbrick himself calls home. Like Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life this remarkable little book will start conversations inspire arguments and best of all bring a new wave of readers to a classic tale waiting to be discovered anew.
language: English
title: Why Read Moby-Dick?
publisher: Viking