Description: Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab#25;s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep#20;from whale hunters to climate refugees.
Brief description: Richard J. King is visiting professor with the Sea Education Association, founding coeditor of Searchable Sea Literature, and a research associate with the Coastal and Ocean Studies Program of Williams College-Mystic Seaport. Most recently, he is the author of Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of "Moby-Dick" and coeditor of Audubon at Sea: The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John James Audubon, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives with his family in Santa Cruz, CA.
Review Quotes: "Employing Melville's maritime setting as a base camp for this ambitious excursion into our present-day relationship with the ocean and its denizens, Ahab's Rolling Sea is that rarest of scholarly books: one that delights as it informs. . . . Key to the book's success is King's skill as a writer. He weaves impressive research--much of it archival--with his own insightful and enthusiastic prose. Topping it off, the book is filled with a rich assemblage of illustrations, maps, and photographs. King writes, 'Like the industry of whaling itself, Melville reveled in the chance to show how the ugly, dirty deep revealed both man's hypocrisies and nature's treasures.' The same can be said of Ahab's Rolling Sea, a book that, like Melville's novel and like the wonders of the ocean, manages to thrill, to educate, and to inspire."--Matthew Wynn Sivils "Isis"