In White-Jacket, Herman Melville carefully described the library aboard an American man-of-war. The books are kept in a barrel, which the ship's librarian must turn over and spill out anytime a sailor wants a book. Melville filled his description with delightful comments about the books that barrel contains. This episode would seem ideal for Hester Blum, who is interested in both the book culture of the nineteenth-century American sailor and the narratives they wrote, but she neglects it: one of many missed opportunities in The View from the Masthead.

Blum claims that her book is the first to discuss the sailor's contribution to literary culture as both reader and writer, producer and consumer. Perhaps no previous book has accomplished both ends, but Harry Skallerup's Books Afloat and Ashore (1974) assembles considerable evidence showing what books sailors read aboard ship. Blum's treatment of the subject is comparatively slight. She provides a couple of inventories of books aboard ship but never fully analyses them. In the logbook of one whaling ship, second mate James Osborn kept a running list of short titles representing the books he read. Blum prints a facsimile of the list but only identifies a few titles – Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot – books that confirm her image of the American sailor as a sensitive, sophisticated reader. She avoids identifying titles that suggest otherwise. The complete list shows that Osborn's reasons for reading were much more complex than Blum makes them out to be. One short title she does not identify, for example, stands for Dr. Richard Reece's gynecological treatise, The Lady's Medical Guide (1832). What was Osborn, a bachelor on a ship filled with bachelors, doing with a gynecological treatise? Blum does not broach that issue.

Blum originally wrote The View from the Masthead as her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn used to be the best place to study literary history in the United States. Gauging by Blum's book, Penn is not teaching literary history anymore. Instead of structuring her discussion of sailor narratives as a literary history, she structures the second half of her book as a philosophical disquisition, “Maritime Epistemology and Crisis.” Her approach obscures, rather than clarifies, the literary significance of these sailor narratives.

Perhaps the reason why no one has told the story of the sailor as consumer and producer of literature in the same book is because the two do not fit together very well. Blum would have been better off choosing one or the other instead of trying to do both. She never really accomplishes her twofold task. Those interested in sailor book culture should consult Skallerup. The literary history of American sailor narratives remains to be written. The View from the Masthead can be left at the bottom of the barrel.