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Reviews tagging 'Emotional abuse'
In the Heart of the Sea: The Incredible True Story that Inspired Moby-Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick
1 review
jhbandcats's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
This is such a powerful book. I have learned so much more history since graduating from high school and college than I ever did when I was taking classes. I love history, I love sea stories, I love adventure / disaster stories. And this is a great one.
Philbrick gives a brief history of Nantucket and the whaling business that dominated the island in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He gives background on the family and island ties, people bound together by their being Quakers in a town with a singular focus on building wealth. He shows how outsiders - either mainlanders or non-Quakers - were ostracized. And he shows the compulsion to be better, faster, more successful than friends and neighbors.
All that came to bear in the disastrous voyage of the whaleship Essex, the ship whose destruction by an angry whale inspired Melville to write Moby Dick. The privations of the men were terrible - I think the worst is having to kill one another to survive. I can see how desperate people would be forced to eat anything they could, even if it were other people, but to eat people who have died is very different from drawing lots to determine who's going to be the next meal. How do you live with that?
Philbrick gives a brief history of Nantucket and the whaling business that dominated the island in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He gives background on the family and island ties, people bound together by their being Quakers in a town with a singular focus on building wealth. He shows how outsiders - either mainlanders or non-Quakers - were ostracized. And he shows the compulsion to be better, faster, more successful than friends and neighbors.
All that came to bear in the disastrous voyage of the whaleship Essex, the ship whose destruction by an angry whale inspired Melville to write Moby Dick. The privations of the men were terrible - I think the worst is having to kill one another to survive. I can see how desperate people would be forced to eat anything they could, even if it were other people, but to eat people who have died is very different from drawing lots to determine who's going to be the next meal. How do you live with that?
Graphic: Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Physical abuse, Blood, Grief, Cannibalism, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism
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