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mafm22 's review for:
Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea
by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
A Harvard University student's two-year sea voyage to Mexican California as a ordinary sailor.
Apparently a huge bestseller in its time. The author was a friend of Herman Melville, and gave Melville editorial help when Moby Dick was being written.
Mainly interesting because it's a 19th century nautical story written by someone who'd actually worked as an ordinary sailor and was highly literate. It's a straightforward story, told in a lively, straightforward way. There are lots of sections that seemed as poetic as anything I can remember in Moby Dick.
It got a bit boring in the last chapter or so, in the final stages of heading home to Boston. The edition I read also had a lot of epilogue and appendices, which were not as entertaining as the main body of the book, although some of this is reasonably interesting. For example, there is a description of his journey back to California 25 years after the events in the story after California had become a part of the United States, and San Francisco had been transformed from a single house into a city with stone buildings and over a 100,000 inhabitants.
Maybe not as good a book as Moby Dick, but very good, and it's non-fiction.
Apparently a huge bestseller in its time. The author was a friend of Herman Melville, and gave Melville editorial help when Moby Dick was being written.
Mainly interesting because it's a 19th century nautical story written by someone who'd actually worked as an ordinary sailor and was highly literate. It's a straightforward story, told in a lively, straightforward way. There are lots of sections that seemed as poetic as anything I can remember in Moby Dick.
It got a bit boring in the last chapter or so, in the final stages of heading home to Boston. The edition I read also had a lot of epilogue and appendices, which were not as entertaining as the main body of the book, although some of this is reasonably interesting. For example, there is a description of his journey back to California 25 years after the events in the story after California had become a part of the United States, and San Francisco had been transformed from a single house into a city with stone buildings and over a 100,000 inhabitants.
Maybe not as good a book as Moby Dick, but very good, and it's non-fiction.