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Title: Great first sentence. Then it's all downhill.
Review: "Call me Ishmael." It's undoubtedly one of the most widely recognized opening lines of any classical novel. Unfortunately, it's also the best line in the book. This is a vast, slow-moving work in which all of the action takes place in the last twenty or so pages. Most of the rest is a more or less inaccurate description of the whaling industry and the anatomy of whales. The sea is perhaps one of the most colorful and compelling backdrops for a novel filled with tension and power, but Melville fails to communicate either of these except in rare moments. Coupled with this is his failure to fully develop what would have been some very interesting characters. One of those rare cases in which the movie was better than the book.
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