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Rating: 
Summary: White-Jacket
Review: I feel quite strange presuming to give a numerical rating to a book by one of American literature's greatest authors. It's important for readers to realize that White-Jacket is not what would, in the modern day, be considered a novel. There is essentially no plot structure. It's a melange of events, descriptive passages and polemic, narrated by the eponymous White-Jacket, whom I suspect of being Melville himself. At times the book is entertainingly humorous - as when the narrator tries to get rid of his famous jacket. And much of the description of life aboard a man-of-war is fascinating -- the book would make a helpful companion for people reading modern novels such as O'Brian's series. (And, of course, White-Jacket probably was one of the sources used by O'Brian and other aquatic novelists.) The polemic -- Melville's rants against flogging and his pacifist pleas -- I found tiresome, as I always find polemic, regardless of its aims.
Rating: 
Summary: Life Within A Total Institution
Review: I read this book after reading Erving Goffman's "Asylums". In that book, Goffman, a sociologist, discusses the rise of "Total Institutions", i.e. institutions that totally control the lives of those within. Melville's "White Jacket" is a book that Goffman often referred to in order to illustrate different aspects of life within the total institution. The introductory essay to this book discusses White Jacket in relationship to the growing bro-ha-ha over slavery, but I thought the book was much more interesting then that. What was most suprising to me, having never read Melville before, was how funny some of the chapters were. Episodes involving Surgeon Cuticle amputating the leg of an unwilling seaman recall the funniest moments of television shows like Monty Python or the Simpsons. Melville's accurate portrayal of life within the "T.I.", reminded me of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". There, the setting is an insane asylum, here it is a Man O' Wear, but both books deal with the tactics and strategies an individual might employ when faced with an oppressive living environment. Although I am not sure when, or if, I might try to tackle author's masterpiece 'Moby Dick', I did come away from this book with a profound respect for Melville's capabilities as a writer. I will no longer take for granted his status among the pantheon of American writers.
Rating:
Summary: Life Within A Total Institution
Review: I read this book after reading Erving Goffman's "Asylums". In that book, Goffman, a sociologist, discusses the rise of "Total Institutions", i.e. institutions that totally control the lives of those within. Melville's "White Jacket" is a book that Goffman often referred to in order to illustrate different aspects of life within the total institution. The introductory essay to this book discusses White Jacket in relationship to the growing bro-ha-ha over slavery, but I thought the book was much more interesting then that. What was most suprising to me, having never read Melville before, was how funny some of the chapters were. Episodes involving Surgeon Cuticle amputating the leg of an unwilling seaman recall the funniest moments of television shows like Monty Python or the Simpsons. Melville's accurate portrayal of life within the "T.I.", reminded me of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". There, the setting is an insane asylum, here it is a Man O' Wear, but both books deal with the tactics and strategies an individual might employ when faced with an oppressive living environment. Although I am not sure when, or if, I might try to tackle author's masterpiece 'Moby Dick', I did come away from this book with a profound respect for Melville's capabilities as a writer. I will no longer take for granted his status among the pantheon of American writers.
Rating:
Summary: Questionable Authority
Review: If you find yourself in a position where the individuals in authority over you are, in the actual state of affairs, your moral inferiors, then on this level alone you will be able to appreciate this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Second to one
Review: This book is second only to Moby-Dick in the list of Melville's greatest works. And Melville's greatest works are America's greatest works.
White-Jacket has it all; humor, pathos, poetry and philosophy. This book makes me not only admire Melville the author but love Melville the man.
To suggest that the book would be better off without its "sermons" against cruelty in the Man-of-War's world is to suggest that Melville should have written some other book. He didn't write that book, he wrote this one and this is the one he wanted us to read. God bless him.
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