Part biography of Melville, part crib notes. Kind of set up like Moby Dick, except that Philbrick covers a subject, say, the port of Nantucket, in a few paragraphs, rather than Melville's lugubrious wanderings (therefore, I was able to skim through this book in an early morning skimming, as opposed to getting marooned in Moby Dick at about page 600).
