Ben Cosgrove: How whales changed America into a world power

D.H. Lawrence famously called"Moby-Dick""one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world," and while plenty of readers might agree with only one or the other of those descriptors, there's no questioning the book's pride of place in America's literary imagination. Vast, unruly, shot through with poetry ("untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven"),"Moby-Dick" remains, more than 150 years after its publication, the most astonishing, mysterious, single-volume feat in our national letters.

Small wonder, then, that Herman Melville, his masterpiece and his ornery white whale surface repeatedly in"Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America"; in fact, all three seem to companionably inform nearly every page of Eric Jay Dolin's captivating, though weirdly uneven, chronicle of the United States' long, profitable and deadly relationship with whales, from the mid-17th to early 20th centuries.....

Now, we're dealing with whales, whalers and a bit of American Gothic and American mythic, here, so let's get something out of the way at the start: Despite the rip-roaring imagery adorning the book's cover -- a justifiably pissed-off beast rising from the depths, smashing a whaleboat, scattering the boat's occupants like matchsticks -- Dolin's story is (thankfully) more than a tale of hardy men going down to the sea in ships, chasing and harpooning anything that moves.

To be sure, there are scenes of wholesale, seaborne slaughter, certain to gratify those who like their history served extra bloody. Mutinies, madness, ships' decks awash in viscera, sweat and blubber -- whaling's innate brutality is on frequent and graphic display. But what ultimately distinguishes"Leviathan" is Dolin's ability to show that, for generations, whaling was far less the romantic adventure of popular imagining (both past and present) than a purely, unapologetically economic engine helping to drive a young country from ambitious, increasingly aggrieved colony to world power....