A sailor with no money and nothing keeping him ashore ships out of Nantucket and discovers, once land is out of sight, that the captain has one purpose left in life and it is not whaling. Around that chase Melville packed a whole encyclopedia — cetology, rope, oil, weather, a sermon, a stage play with the crew as chorus — and the digressions are not the price of the book, they are the book. Nineteen hours is a commitment, but it was written in voices and it wants to be heard in them.
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