RaveScience... a light-hearted and incredibly enjoyable read that manages somehow, at the right moments, to be both broad and narrow in scope. It should be required reading for anyone attempting Moby-Dick ... No captive of the library, King is an experienced seaman and an open-minded and intrepid guide ... Inevitably, a book about a book will begin to assume the shape of its source material. Even so, King writes ably and in scholarly detail about albatrosses, ambergris, baleen, barnacles, seals, sharks, sperm whale behavior and language, swordfish, typhoons, and all sorts of marine and cetological marginalia ... If there is a gentle criticism to make, it is that King writes so well about the places he visits and the people he meets that I found myself hoping for more of his reportage. He is too talented and clear-eyed a writer to confine himself to literary criticism.