Why read Moby-Dick?

 by Nathaniel Philbrick. What a book Melville has written! Hawthorne exclaimed upon first reading Moby Dick. More than 150 years later, Philbrick echoes Hawthorne's enthusiasm. Although he repudiates the various interpretations of Melville's White Whale as a symbol of this or that human nemesis, Philbrick sees in Melville's story of the whale a mythically capacious emblem of the nation that incubated it pulsing with poetic imagination, threatened by grim contradictions, and doomed to a devastating catastrophe. Readers thus come to recognize, for instance, how Melville's portrayal of the Pequod's pious but hard-hearted owners mirrors the bifurcation separating the nation's high-spirited idealism from its real-world addiction to the profits of slavery. And in its harrowing denouement, this prescient novel anticipates the carnage of Cold Harbor and Antietam. To be sure, Philbrick sees in the novel more than a symbol of America's tragically flawed history; he marvels, in fact, at how deeply Melville plumbs mysteries that defy time and geography. By probing the circumstances surrounding Melville's writing of the novel, Philbrick illuminates the intense creative process through which the brooding author melded the darkest elements from the art of Hawthorne and Shakespeare in the crucible of his own fervent agnosticism. Sure to swell the readership of Melville's masterpiece. --Booklist (Check catalog)