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Product Description
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From School Library Journal
Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library. Rocky Hill, CT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
CALL me Ishmael. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Moby Dick,
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This review is from: Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (Mass Market Paperback)
This book is interesting and boring at the same time (I find that hard to believe as well). The beginning starts of fresh, right away the author catches the readers interests, but as you keep on reading you begin to lose interest because the Author brings out filler after filler which frustrates the reader and makes you wonder when is he going to get to the point. Since your so far ahead from where you started to read? you don't want to stop and you start to have that feeling of once you start someting you have to finish it. As the book goes down forward (around page 300) it gets interesting once again.This book was simulatenously good and bad, you have to have a lot of patience for this book, if you don't you'll just drop it and pick up something new. The only reason I picked up this book was because it's a classic, and the only reason I tortured myself into reading this book any further was because... it was a classic. 3/5 because it was somewhat good. I suggest you just watch the movie and forget about reading the book, it's almost the same thing.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Moby Dick,
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This review is from: Moby-Dick (Mass Market Paperback)
The print is much too small, making reading rather difficult. Also, the paper is very light, making page-turning a bit delicate.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't get bogged down in the middle. The end is worth it.,
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This review is from: Moby-Dick (Mass Market Paperback)
The thing I always tell people about Moby Dick is that the beginning is lighthearted fun, the ending is amazing, and the middle is (to be blunt) quite dull. I think most people who make it to the end love the book, but getting there is a chore because Melville spends a great deal of time either talking about minutia of the whaling trade, or going off onto tangents almost in a stream of consciousness fashion that seem to have very little to do with the narrative (he devotes an entire chapter to telling why the color white is frightening, and another to listing characters from legend whom he identifies as whalers (Perseus I can see, but St. George?)). The language is gloriously poetic in places, but other times it rambles almost aimlessly and feels very convoluted and self-indulgent, even by 19th century standards. (Yes, I know these are qualities that the book's devotees hold dear, but they're also the reason that so many people never finish the thing. Might as well be honest about it.)At the end, it's extremely disturbing getting into Ahab's head and understanding what makes him tick-disturbing because it's present in all of us, an instrinsic part of the human condition: his rage at not being God. Ahab is pride incarnate, with all the hatred that comes with it. (The story of Jonah, sermonized in the beginning, is ultimately one of the need for humility before God, with the whale as God's agent. And it's important that Jonah's sin is not merely disobedience but a refusal to go on a mission of mercy.). I felt unsettled for a long time after I read this, because it demonstrates what a short jump it is between a classically Satanic villain (a being of total pride and hate waging an all-destructive and ultimately futile war on God, and luring all others to follow him to damnation) to the modern concept of the existentialist hero, fighting bravely against hopeless odds. Seen through his own eyes, Ahab is genuinely heroic--and then the reader has to step back and realize that on the contrary, hatred has all but consumed Ahab's soul, leaving the Rachel without help and leading his crew to death for his own pride's sake. If to understand is to approve, the reader who now understands Ahab is left asking, "Good God, what kind of person am I?" Today we tend to view pride as a virtue rather than a vice; what does that make any of us? Needless to say, there's a lot there. It wasn't until years after I'd read the book that I'd sorted it out enough in my mind to feel that I finally "got it," and I'm still in the process of getting it. Everything in Moby Dick is a symbol, and I suppose that no two people completely agree on what the symbols represent (Melville surely wanted a degree of ambiguity, anyway). Here are my own opinions on what it all means: (spoiler warning) The whale represents God. Starbuck is Christendom. Even though Queequeg is one of the pagans, it is through his seeming death and resurrection midway through the novel that Ishmael lives--because of the coffin. And Starbuck, innocent of any crime, goes down with the ship anyway (giving Ahab pause, just before his own death, to essentially stop and say in horror, "What have I done?") I'm not sure what Pip represents. If you're buying a paperback, I'd recommend the Tor edition, (ISBN 0812543076) just because I think it's got a very nice cover painting, something publishers often don't bother with when reprinting a "classic."
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