Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of "Moby-Dick"

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 t