By a reviewer Inabif (not real name)
Fascinating and Beautifully Written!, January 17, 2013---5 Stars
If you have any interest in Melville, Moby-Dick, literary
biography ... or beautiful, lucid prose, Professor Parker's magnificent new
book is for you. I can't recommend it highly enough. Imagine: A brilliant
scholar who can write! No wonder Parker understands Melville better than any of
the many Melvilleans working today--he is a fellow writer. The book is
chock-full of so many illuminating and fascinating elements. Whether he is
explaining to us--always so clearly and entertainingly--what he knows of
Melville's hotel dinner with Hawthorne, at which HM presented one of the first
copies of Moby-Dick to its dedicatee, and how he knows it, or elucidating the
enormity of the cost HM (and his family) paid for his genius and it
manifestation on paper, Parker is always your favorite college lecturer--wise,
informed, enthused, reasoned, often funny, and empathetic. He desires to tell
you why he loves Melville and why you will, too. Parker also knows the value of
archival research--and the hours and miles logged during the creation of his
definitive two-volume life of HM are stunning. Mr. Parker has the ability to
convey the excitement of the true research scholar in the moment of "the
find," as in this passage: "There will always be a few literary
detectives who devote months or years to the pursuit of documents in the
confidence that at last they will sit at midnight in a little bare motel room
in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and turn through a big shoebox full of what
looks like only bills of lading until they spy a blue folded paper, clearly a
letter, a letter with the signature `Really Thine, H Melville'..."
Melville, our greatest novelist, deserves Parker, our greatest biographer. My own opinion is that Parker was robbed of the Pulitzer for Herman Melville: A Biography. Is it too much to hope that the Pulitzer committee corrects its mistake by selecting Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative for next year's prize?
Melville, our greatest novelist, deserves Parker, our greatest biographer. My own opinion is that Parker was robbed of the Pulitzer for Herman Melville: A Biography. Is it too much to hope that the Pulitzer committee corrects its mistake by selecting Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative for next year's prize?
The writer is now identified as Jack O'Connell, and more power to Jack O'Connell!
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