a book

Moby Dick

Name: Moby Dick
Rating: 5 (30 reviews)
Author: Herman Melville
ISBN: 9781853260087

Herman Melville · 2003 · 544 pages

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'.

Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.

Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:

in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his 'mighty theme' - not only the whale but all things sublime - Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

recommended by 30 people

sourced from public statements

Steve Jobs
““Jobs told me that Moby Dick was among his favorite books and he reread it a lot when he was a teen.” -Walter Isaacson”↗
Bob Dylan
“Moby Dick is a fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab—captain of a ship called the Pequod—an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth. It’s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab’s got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now and again. You can anticipate what will happen.”↗
Ben Shapiro
“"When I was slightly older: 1. Moby Dick (Melville) 2. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain)"”↗
Penn Jillette
“My favorite book; I’m always reading it. As soon as I finish it, I start it again. Consider this line: ‘So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.’ To me that means the white whale is God, and Ahab is wasting his life chasing God.”↗
Bruce Springsteen
“I just finished Moby-Dick, which scared me off for a long time due to the hype of its difficulty. I found it to be a beautiful boy’s adventure story and not that difficult to read. Warning: You will learn more about whales than you have ever wished to know. On the other hand, I never wanted it to end.”↗
Susan Orlean
“I had to save the best for last, of course. Also, it seemed only fair to save the book that is the counter-example to the rest of the list; it doesn’t celebrate animals and it doesn’t marvel at our relationship to them. It rages madly against them, or at least against the ultimate antagonist, the dread white whale Moby Dick. All the while, it confirms the potency of our connection to animals. Whether we fear them, eat them, train them, or dream about them, they’re central to our lives.”↗
Daniel Goleman
“Reading can improve our competence in empathy and reduce unconscious bias, among other benefits. Here are a few book recommendations to guide you in this endeavor. #emotionalintelligence #empathy #EI”↗
Tilda Swinton
“Swinton read the first chapter of Moby Dick as part of the Moby Dick Big Read, a project bringing the classic to the masses through readings by famous personalities. Listen on Soundcloud.”↗
John Irving
“The greatness is in the ending, which manages to be both inevitable and surprising. And the power of the ending relies on the foreshadowing. Why does Ishmael meet a “cannibal” harpooner at the Spouter-Inn before the Pequod sets sail? Why is Queequeg from the South Seas? Why is he not a Christian but an “abominable savage”? You’ll see — when Queequeg’s coffin is all that will keep Ishmael afloat. For me, Moby-Dick is the greatest of novels.”↗
Hugh Laurie
“I believe some people have already remarked on this novel. Unflaggingly brilliant and stunningly modern. Besides learning a huge amount about whales and seafaring, you can also impress your friends with the origin of the name Starbuck.”↗
Ray Bradbury
“I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry of the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout…I turned back to the start: ‘Call me Ishmael,’ and I was in love!”↗
Morgan Freeman
“This classic instilled an interest in sailing and began my lifelong love of the sea.”↗
Ocean Vuong
“I have always felt that Melville was the writer who enacted Whitman’s decree for American multiplicity in ways far richer and complex than Whitman did himself. A book that simply refuses to compromise, that employs the autobiographical gaze to suggest radical modes of queerness, polytheism as progressive self-knowledge, expansive meditations on whiteness, both in regards to the whale’s purity and to race, Moby-Dick forges the allegory of the hunt as a doomed American quest for self-knowledge. Reading it, I thought, What would happen if a queer Asian American decided, in Melville’s vein, to also not compromise? What would happen if all modes of voices, themes, threads, systems of knowledge and influence were potent in equal measure within the novel’s temporal investigation?”↗
Harold Bloom
“Melville’s magnificent prose epic is at once a superb sea yarn and a profound critique of Yahweh, source of the unwarranted suffering of Job. I cannot think of any other American fictive prose as memorable and transfixing as that with which Melville constructs his tragic vision of Captain Ahab.”↗
Eric Rauchway
“@chick_in_kiev I would really enjoy it if you did the podcast. Really really. It's such a good book.”↗
Jacquelyn Gill
“@seelix You are in for such a treat. That book is so far from what I expected in so many good ways and I was delighted.”↗
Talia Lavin
“@DabenoCrow ive read and loved older books! moby dick is my favorite book. stoker just isnt that good a writer!”↗
Barack Obama
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Philip Marsden
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