no need to review the book itself--it's a heater, we all know that--but I do feel more or less ambivalent about reading the NCE. footnotes ran a broad gamut of revelatory to banal: more often than I would have liked I was pulled from the beauty of the text to be explained a biblical allusion (snore!). but when the footnotes elucidated nautical history, sailor slang, the intricacies of a whaling vessel--boy howdy, that's some good shit! appendices ranged a similar spectrum. perhaps some would find the exhaustive contemporary reviews interesting, but I skipped almost all of these. ditto for the 20th century literary criticism. loved, loved, loved the appendices about whaling vessels, the robust glossary of nautical terms, and the incredible textual work Melville scholars have undertaken to emend Moby-Dick into its truest form. Jonathan Lethem has a fun, personal essay near the end, and there are some nice pieces which elaborate on Moby-Dick's massive influence on popular culture in the late 20th- and early 21st-centuries.

if you are going to read Moby-Dick for the first time, I would not recommend this edition. great for those looking to deepen their understanding of the novel, though, and of the milieu in which Melville was raised, worked, and wrote.