Books about Whaling from Amazon.com

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In a small Cape Cod village in 1761, one woman is about to engage in the struggle of her life, defying her family, friends, and neighbors in a fight for her freedom that resonates even today. . . .

When was it that the sense of trouble grew to fear, the fear to certainty? When she sat down to another solitary supper of bread and beer and pickled cucumber? When she heard the second sounding of the geese? Or had she known that morning when she stepped outside and felt the wind? Might as well say she knew it when Edward took his first whaling trip to the Canada River. . . .

Lyddie has long been the wife of Edward Berry, a well-liked and successful whaler in Satucket Village, Massachusetts. Married for twenty years, Lyddie is used to the trials of being a whaling wife -- her husband's sudden departures, when whales are sighted in the bay; his long absences at sea, when she must run the house herself; the constant fear that one day Edward will simply not come home. But when the unthinkable does happen and Edward is lost at sea, Lyddie finds that she must bear not only the grief of losing her husband but also the insult of losing her autonomy. As a widow, she finds herself cast into society's cellar, her property and rights now at the whim of her nearest male relative, who happens to be her daughter's husband.

With her son-in-law -- who was never Lyddie's first choice for her daughter -- implacable and hostile, Lyddie realizes she cannot live under his roof and under his decrees. Refusing to bow to both her “guardian” and the societal and legal pressures brought to bear upon her, Lyddie finds that defying one rule emboldens her to defy another . . . and another. As she moves back into the house she shared with Edward -- the house she is entitled to use only one-third of now -- and begins to figure out how she'll make a living on her own, she finds that her defiance earns her nothing but the abuse of friends and neighbors and puts her home and her family at risk. Ultimately, Lyddie must decide how much she values her personal freedom and how willing she is to become estranged from those she loves.

While conjuring the hearths and salt air of eighteenth-century colonial America, The Widow's War captures a timeless human longing. With rich, realistic characters, Sally Gunning weaves a tale of a woman's journey to understand herself and her world, and her place in that world. Honest and moving, The Widow's War is a stunning work of literary magic, a spellbinding tale from an assured and gifted writer.

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"The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation "—Nathaniel Philbrick

Leviathan is the epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," Herman Melville proclaimed, and this absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. Eric Jay Dolin begins his vivid narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614. He then chronicles the rise of a burgeoning industry—from its brutal struggles during the Revolutionary period to its golden age in the mid-1800s when a fleet of more than 700 ships hunted the seas and American whale oil lit the world, to its decline as the twentieth century dawned. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs. Containing a wealth of naturalistic detail on whales, Leviathan is the most original and stirring history of American whaling in many decades. 32 pages of illustrations..
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The history of America at sea is presented through the travels of Seabird, a carved ivory gull..
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Herman Melville's peerless allegorical masterpiece is the epic saga of the fanatical Captain Ahab, who swears vengeance on the mammoth white whale that has crippled him. Often considered to be the Great American Novel, Moby-Dick is at once a starkly realistic story of whaling, a romance of unusual adventure, and a searing drama of heroic courage, moral conflict, and mad obsession. It is world-renowned as the greatest sea story ever told.

Moby-Dick, widely misunderstood in its own time, has since become an indubitable classic of American literature..
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You may think you've read Moby-Dick, but this new edition reveals a text you've never seen: the first American edition as Melville wrote and edited it himself, enhanced with unprecedented discussions of the revisions which Melville, his British editors, and 20th-century scholars later made to his book.

Bryant and Springer, both Melville scholars, bring this classic into the 21st century with the first critical edition in forty years - presented in a beautiful design which wears its elegant scholarship lightly for the general reader. Throughout the book, a special typeface indicates passages in Moby-Dick that were later revised. On-page revision narratives describe the exact changes Melville or his British editors made to the 1851 American text and those made for the 1967 Northwestern-Newberry edition (the version most widely read today), and explain the story behind each revision. Minimal footnotes offer lively explanations of key glossary and other terms right on the page, while more extensive, often entertaining Explanatory Notes and Revision Narratives are found at the back of the book. The result is that readers are immersed in the personal, social, and cultural context of Melville's novel and his writing process

An illuminating Introduction relates a history of the composition of Moby-Dick in the context of Melville's life, talent, and career.

A glossary - running both on the page and at the end of the text - brings the language and otherwise arcane nautical terms to life.

A number of the annotations reveal revisions that the British publisher required, essentially censoring the work.

Thoroughly annotated, readers will now have, in one place, everything they need for a true understanding of this great American novel.

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Having had enough of life on board the ship that saved her from a watery grave, Dido Twite wants nothing more than to sail home to England Instead, Captain Casket's ship lands in Nantucket, where Dido and the captain's daughter, Dutiful Penitence, are left in the care of Dutiful's sinister Aunt Tribulation In Tribulation's farmhouse, life is unbearable. When mysterious men lurk about in the evening fog, the resourceful Dido rallies against their shenanigans with help from Dutiful, a cabinboy named Nate, and a pink whale..
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