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Summary
Summary
In 1820, the Essex was rammed by an enraged sperm whale and sunk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As the ship went down, the twenty-man crew, many of whom were teenagers, piled into three leaky boats with minimal supplies and little hope. Yet three months later, eight of the men were rescued. How these young men overcame starvation, dehydration, and the maddening fear of a vengeful whale is an adventure that was famous in the nineteenth century and that thrills readers to this day.
Now Nathaniel Philbrick brings that adventure to life for young readers. Including maps, diagrams, and an eight-page photo insert, Revenge of the Whale will keep readers on the edge of their seats as it recounts the shocking ordeal these brave men endured.
Author Notes
Nathaniel Philbrick was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 11, 1956. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Brown University and a master's degree in American literature from Duke University. In 1978, he was Brown University's first Intercollegiate All-American sailor and he won the Sunfish North Americans in Barrington, Rhode Island. After graduate school, he worked for four years at Sailing World magazine. Afterward, he worked as a freelancer for a number of years and wrote/edited several sailing books including Yachting: A Parody.
After moving to Nantucket in 1986, he became interested in the history of the island and wrote Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People. In 2000 he published In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. A motion picture of the book was released in December 2015. His other books include Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition; Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War; The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution; Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, and In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6-10-Nathaniel Philbrick's Revenge of the Whale (Grosset, 2002), an abridgement of his adult title, In the Heart of the Sea (Viking, 2000), is the true story of hardship and survival on the last voyage of the whale ship Essex in 1820. Using the accounts of two of the crewmen who survived, Philbrick tells the story of the crew's struggles to stay alive after the ship was rammed by a whale and damaged beyond repair in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. While Taylor Mali's narration provides little vocal excitement, the electrifying details of cannibalism and the attacks by whales and sharks is enough to hold students' attention. Mali's reading makes it difficult to distinguish between the two crew members' accounts or any other quoted source used by Philbrick. While there are some dramatic changes in his tone when climatic scenes build, there is not enough suspense in his voice to keep students interested until the next thrilling moment. The sea songs at the beginning and end are catchy, and students will learn a great deal about whaling in the early 1800's. Although this is not a rousing read, middle school students who like sea stories will be engaged by the descriptive passages of the hardships encountered by the crew of the Essex.-Anita Lawson, Otsego High School, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
For older readers, Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick describes a tale worthy of Ahab: on November 20, 1820, an angry sperm whale took vengeance on the men who would slay it for oil. Adapted from Philbrick's bestselling title for adults, In the Heart of the Sea, the narrative draws from primary sources, including the account of cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, who joined the crew at age 14. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Middle School, High School) In the tradition of harrowing accounts of Shackleton's Antarctic expedition and the Donner Party's Sierra Nevada trek, Philbrick brings readers onboard for the tragic voyage of the Nantucket whaleship Essex. In November 1820, a sixty-ton sperm whale rammed and sank the Essex, leaving the twenty-man crew stranded one thousand miles off the coast of Chile. After three months in three small, ill-equipped boats, eight men remained alive-barely. Adapting and abridging (by over one hundred pages) his National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea for a younger audience, Philbrick offers a totally engrossing account of the sailors' ordeal, which included enduring extreme weather, dehydration, and despair. An authority on Nantucket history and a sailor himself, Philbrick distills much of the adult book's meticulous detail (on, for example, Nantucket's economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) with respect for his readers' intelligence and without losing the power of his gripping narrative. Relying heavily on the recently recovered 1876 writings of one of the survivors-the ship's fourteen-year-old cabin boy-this accessible telling is well suited to young readers. With the flair of a seasoned storyteller, Philbrick balances the tension of the unfolding drama with pertinent background about crew members and onboard race and class distinctions; information about provisions and gear; and graphic, measured descriptions of the hunting and killing of whales. The exhaustive and horrific portrayal of the crew members' suffering after the attack is especially affecting, and the irony of the whale's non-anthropomorphized ""revenge"" is hard to dispute. An annotated reading list replaces the first book's extensive chapter notes and bibliography; maps and black-and-white photos and reproductions have been reorganized a bit. This is a well-documented real-life survival story of epic proportions, as well as an object lesson in historical writing for any age. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Philbrick cuts down his National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea (2000) for a younger audience, but leaves in plenty of gruesome detail. In a notorious incident that later inspired the climactic scene in Moby-Dick, the Nantucket whaler Essex was attacked and sunk by a huge sperm whale, leaving 20 crew members in three small boats, "just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth." After three months of terrible privation, eight survivors were rescued; two of whom went on to write about the experience. Philbrick draws expertly from these sometimes contradictory narratives, as well as other documents and modern research, all to create a stomach-churningly precise account that includes just how whales were hunted and cut up, the effects of prolonged thirst ("The tongue swells to such proportions that it squeezes past the jaw. The eyelids crack and the eyeballs begin to weep tears of blood . . . "), and the fact that most of the survivors lived by eating their shipmates-African-Americans and non-Nantucketers first. The author tucks in plenty of maps, diagrams, and contemporary prints, and rounds off this horrifyingly engrossing entry in the annals of anthropophagy with a look at the survivors' later lives. Fans of Marian Calabro's Perilous Journey of the Donner Party (1999) and the like will lick their chops. (bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12+)