Why Read Moby-Dick?

This is not the typical “great book you may have missed,” though its subject matter certainly fits the bill.  Why Read Moby-Dick? is a brief but brilliantly conceived testament by bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick to the enduring merits and majesty of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  Philbrick talks about Melville’s life and the process of craft that brought him to write Moby-Dick, and he explores the relationship between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne that played such a vital role in Melville’s state of mind during this time in his life.  Philbrick has also written a penetrating examination of not just the power of Moby-Dick as a narrative, but the scope of this novel as an analysis of the historical and cultural United States.  What makes this book so special to me – however – is the fact that it not only serves its purpose as being a wonderful advertisement for reading one of the greatest novels of all-time, but that it explores in a very accessible way the importance and breadth of fiction.  There are books that are much more than their basic plotline, much more than their superficial content.  And I think that Philbrick’s decision to craft this as basically a kind of essay – it runs only 144 pages long and is the size of a mass-market paperback – helps foster his idea of the accessibility of great literature.  Is everyone who reads this going to read, or re-read, Moby-Dick?  Probably not.  Yet perhaps those who choose not to follow Ahab and the great white whale may seek out some other long desired experience of literature and find the beauty in that work of art.  Or maybe they’ll start to look behind the curtain a bit and read more critically the next time around.  Whatever happens, whenever it happens, Nathaniel Philbrick has done the world another favor by continuing to produce insightful, historical work that helps us navigate the oceans of our collective past.