Moby Dick is a century old classic by Herman Melville. The book is about a young boy named Ishmael who longs to go to sea and signs up for a voyage on the whaling ship Pequod. It seems like an ordinary trip until the ship’s captain, Ahab, announces his true plan. He wants revenge on the malevolent white whale that maimed him. Ishmael’s dream voyage becomes a terrifying fight for survival as they chase white Moby Dick across the world.
The one thing I liked about Herman Melville’s writing style is that it’s easy to understand the book. If you’re reading a book about war, it’s sometimes hard to understand the book because you’ve never experienced war, you don’t know what it’s like. Herman was on a real whaling ship before he became a writer so he made it easy to understand but at the same time “unputdownable”.
My favorite part of the book was when Herman described the gruesome process of extracting oil from a whale’s blubber. Since we don’t use whale oil anymore, I was interested in how the sailors of the 19th century earned their living. I learnt that very little of the whale- which is usually a sperm whale because it’s blubber has the finest oil- was wasted. The only things that were really thrown back into the sea were bones and other useless items like the whale’s teeth. Every other part had some useful purpose. For example spermaceti, a white, frothy liquid found in a sperm whale’s head, was used to make candles for cathedrals and it was also used as boot polish!
Moby Dick might have been Herman Melville’s greatest novel, but it destroyed his literary career. Critics hated the book, and Herman suffered from depression for the rest of his life. Born in August 1819, Herman was forced to work to support his family after the family business collapsed and his father died. He got a job on the whaler Acushnet. The captain was a cruel man and treated his men brutally, so Herman deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and lived with a local band of Typee villagers for a month. When he got home he had an incredible story to tell, thus his first book Typee which was a hit with the readers of New England. From 1849 to 1850 he was at the peak of his success, but after that his popularity began to decline. He wrote two novels, Moby Dick and Pierre before resigning from his job as a New York docks customs officer and lived quietly until his death in 1891. Only during the interwar years (1918-1939) did Herman Melville earn his place among history’s most famous authors.
The one thing I liked about Herman Melville’s writing style is that it’s easy to understand the book. If you’re reading a book about war, it’s sometimes hard to understand the book because you’ve never experienced war, you don’t know what it’s like. Herman was on a real whaling ship before he became a writer so he made it easy to understand but at the same time “unputdownable”.
My favorite part of the book was when Herman described the gruesome process of extracting oil from a whale’s blubber. Since we don’t use whale oil anymore, I was interested in how the sailors of the 19th century earned their living. I learnt that very little of the whale- which is usually a sperm whale because it’s blubber has the finest oil- was wasted. The only things that were really thrown back into the sea were bones and other useless items like the whale’s teeth. Every other part had some useful purpose. For example spermaceti, a white, frothy liquid found in a sperm whale’s head, was used to make candles for cathedrals and it was also used as boot polish!
Moby Dick might have been Herman Melville’s greatest novel, but it destroyed his literary career. Critics hated the book, and Herman suffered from depression for the rest of his life. Born in August 1819, Herman was forced to work to support his family after the family business collapsed and his father died. He got a job on the whaler Acushnet. The captain was a cruel man and treated his men brutally, so Herman deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and lived with a local band of Typee villagers for a month. When he got home he had an incredible story to tell, thus his first book Typee which was a hit with the readers of New England. From 1849 to 1850 he was at the peak of his success, but after that his popularity began to decline. He wrote two novels, Moby Dick and Pierre before resigning from his job as a New York docks customs officer and lived quietly until his death in 1891. Only during the interwar years (1918-1939) did Herman Melville earn his place among history’s most famous authors.
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