| Title | : | The Perfect Storm : A True Story of Men Against the Sea (Cassette/Abridged) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0679460357 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780679460350 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Audio Cassette |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
| Publication | : | First published May 1, 1997 |
| Awards | : | Laurence L. & Thomas Winship/PEN New England Award Nonfiction (2007), ALA Alex Award (1998) |
Abridged
Read by Stanley Tucci
It was the storm of the century -- a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm."
When it struck in October, 1991, there was virtually no warning. "She's comin' on, boys, and she's comin' on strong," radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrea Gail from off the coast of Nova Scotia. Soon afterward, the boat and its crew of six disappeared without a trace.
The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller, a stark and compelling journey into the dark heart of nature that leaves listeners with a breathless sense of what it feels like to be caught, helpless, in the grip of a force beyond understanding or control.
The Perfect Storm : A True Story of Men Against the Sea (Cassette/Abridged) Reviews
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I didn't see the film so I came fresh to the book. It had a lot of impact on me because I have been in a small boat, a 34' catamaran in a 4 day storm out in the Atlantic before Brazil. It wasn't a 'perfect storm' but it was still rough, with huge seas and a constant exhausting beating against the wind. It prevented us going into
Fernando do Noronha, our next stop, we couldn set a course for the archipelago at all. So I could not just see but feel what a difficult position they were in.
I know quite a bit about sword-fishing. I've read
Linda Greenlaw's books. An aside - there are very few countries and vessels in the world where a woman would have the opportunity to swordfish let alone be a captain. It is an extremely physical job, setting hooks and squid bait, on spooled longlines hat run for miles and rip your fingers. The hooks are so big they could rip right through a man's palm if the spool should run on. Then there is the killing of the swordfish when hauled in, gutting and icing them. As well as directing the crew, a hard-drinking group of macho men, maintaining the boat, it's structure, mechanics and electronics. The electronics, depth sounders, radar and the like are not just for navigation but crucial in working out where the fish are. This was Linda's strength, this finding the schools of swordfish.
Not only was Greenlaw one of an infintessimally small number of women swordfishing, but she was the most successful captain of all time. Where the normal catch is 1 ton a day, for seven days straight she hauled in 5 tons each day. The money from the catch on a boat is 50% to the owner, then the expenses are taken off and a set formula applied to the rest where the captain takes the most and the newest deckhand the least. That month the deckhand took home $10,000.
How do I know about swordfishing? My ex-husband was Chief Fisheries Officer and used to supervise the boats that came to fish in our waters. Because the permits they bought were limited in what they could do and the by catch could not be sold, a local would always be on the boat with them, sometimes my ex. It was all quite fascinating.
Swordfish have a long, barbed extension to their jaw that is both a weapon of attack and used to slash prey fish to weaken them. When they are hauled on board alive, they are very brave and will attack to the last. They can kill a man, or almost as bad, a wound from the sword will almost always become infected and the boat might be very far in distance and time from home.
There are always by-catch pulled up with the swordfish. There are the tuna. If you've only seen one dead held aloft by a fisherman it's as if you'd only ever seen a rose browned with frost and never in it's full bloom. Sailing across the ocean, three Atlantic blue fin tuna, each about 15' swam in front of the boat maintaining an exact distance for more than hour. They were gorgeous, a rainbow of shimmering colours like sunlight on oil, like just beneath the surface. But the tuna aren't a problem, they are gutted and thrown on to the ice along with the swordfish - generally a perk of the fishermen, the boat owner doesn't get a share of by-catch.
The problem is the live sharks pulled up. They are vicious and their carcass is dangerous. It alone will rip the skin from a man. It's not smooth, it's not even sandpaper-like, it's actually covered in tiny teeth, denticles. Sharks have to be shot as they being pulled up. The fishermen sometimes take the teeth as mementos and to sell. The flesh has to be thrown overboard immediately before it spoils and stinks of ammonia, piss. If shark is bled within minutes of being caught, and then iced, it is delicious. It's a firm, white fish with a mild flavour. Very nice deep fried in the Trinidadian style of
bake and shark with chives, thyme, garlic and hot peppers.
The book was a blow-by-blow account of the storm and how it affected the crew, their family on shore, and the boat, Andrea Gale, Linda Greenlaw's sister ship. Linda's boat was the Hannah Boden, both owned by Alden Leeman. The boat foundered amidst terrible seas and all crew were lost and never found. It was a harrowing story, and because I knew the subject so well, I lived through it and felt it and it upset me a great deal. The author, Sebastian Junger, has that power to bring you into the story and involve you. I did enjoy it, but perhaps not in quite the way one usually uses the word "enjoy". -
"There was no God to turn to for mercy. There was no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history... Inside the ship, as the heel increased, even the most primitive social organization, the human chain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clock was running. The ocean was completely in control..."
-- William Langewiesche, A Sea Story
On October 28, 1991, the fishing vessel Andrea Gail and her crew of six men disappeared off the Grand Banks in a tremendous storm created by...etc., etc. By now, everyone knows the story of this ill-fated little boat, her tiny crew, and the massive storm that swallowed them whole. The book was a bestseller the instant it came out. A blockbuster movie followed. The phrase "a perfect storm" is the most-overused shorthand phrase in our culture (for awhile I thought it might be overtaken by "Wall Street verses Main Street," but alas, the election is over, and storms without imperfection are back in vogue).
Once upon a time, though, before George Clooney grew a great beard and drove his boat up a mountain-sized CGI wave, A Perfect Storm was simply a sharp bit of journalism. Sebastian Junger found a newspaper clipping about the Andrea Gail's fate, went to Gloucester with pen and pad, and delved into the lives of her crew, entering a normally taciturn and reticent community to show us their lives before their deaths. (It's worth remembering that Junger's book came out long before the History Channel abdicated it's purported mission to bring us Ice Road Truckers and Axe Men and before the Discovery Channel presented Swamp Loggers and Heli-Loggers and yes, Deadliest Catch. Nowadays, celebration of blue-collar life is a cultural norm; it wasn't always that way).
Almost from the first sentences, Junger - who has now morphed into a semi-self-righteous, self-styled Homer of Afghanistan - shows he has an excellent grasp of place:[T:]he smell of the ocean is so strong...it can almost be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and men in t-shirts stained with fishblood shout to each other from the decks of boats. Beneath them the ocean swells up against the black pilings and sucks back down to the barnacles. Beer cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall and pools of spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge irridescent jelly fish.
The Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch - of which I am a huge fan - has turned a spotlight on the lives of fishermen. We see these grizzled tough guys in all their rotgut swilling, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed glory. At the time this was written, though, Junger's work was revelatory. He presented them as iconoclasts; men who lived entirely in moments. They could go out on a boat for a couple of weeks, make a big score, blow thousands of dollars in a couple days, and go right back out on the ocean to do it again. Junger finds a way to celebrate these lives without neglecting the broken marriages, child support orders, and limited windows within which these men could succeed.
After introducing us to the doomed - Billy Tyne, Michael Moran, Dale Murphy, Alfred Pierre, Bobby Shatford, and David Sullivan - Junger sets out to sea.
This is where things could have gotten very tricky. See, very little is known about what happened to the Andrea Gail. There were no survivors. No mayday calls. The EPIRBs never activated. Attempts to locate the wreckage on the ocean floor have so far failed. All we have is an empty ocean and miles to fill with supposition. There are only two ways to write this story. First, Junger could have accepted he did not have enough material for a book, and allowed this tale to remain as a long-form article, which is how it began (the article is called The Storm, published in Outside magazine). Or two, he could write a book in which the central event can only be hypothesized.
Junger chose the latter, and having read many disaster books since, I can see he chose a route fraught with peril (relative to the craft of writing, of course). With so little upon which to hang the central narrative, Junger has no choice but to pad the book with digressions and to shift the story away from the Andrea Gail and to other, luckier boats caught in the storm. Done poorly, this tact would have left me resentful that I'd been sold a bill of goods. Somehow, though, he pulls it off.
This is kind of a surprise. Something about Sebastian Junger just calls out to be disliked. Maybe it's his chiseled jaw, perfectly symmetrical face, and artfully cultivated five o'clock shadow. Maybe it's the scent of young-French-nobleman that he gives off; a willingness to thrust himself into new worlds with both curiosity and entitlement (this is, unfortunately, a strong undercurrent in his flat collection of stories entitled Fire, a book notable today for a cameo made by former Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Massoud, whose assassination by al Qaida was prepatory to the 9/11 attacks).
Junger is both everyman and know-it-all. He can swill Wild Turkey while still cogitating on fluid dynamics, long-line fishing, and the science of drowning. There’s a whiff of Cliff Clavin about him, sitting at the end of the bar, half in the bag, telling all the neighborhood drunks that their deeply held views about Afghanistan are ill-conceived. Except unlike Cliff, Junger is probably right, which makes him a little less likeable.
His saving grace is his ability to write. Like the best journalists, Junger writes clearly, includes telling details, and manages to convey difficult concepts - like the physics of waves - in a way that makes you feel better because you can understand them. He also knows all the emotional beats, and hits every one. Junger intuits just where to place a single, short sentence such as "no one got off alive" in order to induce chills. For instance, I've never forgotten the section of The Perfect Storm that tells you how someone drowns:The diving reflex...is compounded by the general effect of cold temperature on tissue - it preserves it. All chemical reactions, and metabolic processes, become honey-slow, and the brain can get by on less than half the oxygen it normally requires. There are cases of people spending forty or fifty minutes under lake ice and surviving. The colder the water, the stronger the diving reflex, and the longer the survival time. The crew of the Andrea Gail do not find themselves in particularly cold water, though; it may add five or ten minutes to their lives. And there is no one around to save them anyway. The electrical activity in their brain gets weaker and weaker until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, it ceases altogether
Theories about what happened to the Andrea Gail, no matter how well-reasoned and detailed, could not have supported The Perfect Storm in book-length. There needed to be a B-story. Here, Junger chooses to highlight the heroics and plight of the Coast Guard's parajumpers, an elite squad of the best swimmers on Earth (and also the subject of the Kevin Costner vehicle, The Guardian, which despite Ashton Kutcher's presence, is not nearly as bad as you think). These parts of the book are tense, white-knuckled, and agonizing, since unlike the foreordained fate of the Andrea Gail's crew, you have no idea who is going to live and who is going to die.
The Perfect Storm is one of my favorite books. It is, as the subheading announces, a story of men against the sea. In other words, it's a sea yarn (perhaps my favorite yarn genre), and Junger is a great raconteur. He pulls together a number of different threads - science, literature, the Bible, various sea stories - to form a single, powerful piece. It is a bit of audaciousness that pays off.
As I read this, I pictured Junger as my narrator, my own personal Marlow, wearing a flannel shirt and sitting at the end of a dark Gloucester bar with smoke-stained walls and a swordfish hung over the fireplace. He strokes his perfect stubble while sipping Scotch neat. Outside, an autumn gale is raging, pelting the windows with rain. In the distance, a foghorn sounds mournfully. Junger begins to speak in his gruff-yet-Wesleyan-educated voice. The story is about men who go out in boats, and about the seemingly-infinite sea, which - like the Universe - never ceases to awe, no matter how small the rest of the world gets; the story tells of the power of waves and the dark spray-swept terror and the loneliness of death and the men out on the ocean who vanish, and whose lives are memories and whose deaths are mysteries. -
“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?”
October 1991 - It was "the perfect storm"
Most of us have seen the movie. I have watched it many times and was inspired to read this book for a reading challenge. I found it to be well written, thoughtful, educational, moving and heart breaking. The amount of research that went into the writing of this book is impressive. Junger did his homework and it shows. If you are expecting the book to be like the movie you watched, you will be a little disappointed. This book not only introduces you to the doomed men who set sail on the Andrea Gail, it also tells the story of other boaters, their near misses, a helicopter going down, rescues, the dangers of hurricanes, the ships that sunk and the dangers of fishing.
"Fishing continues to be one of the easiest ways in which to die while earning a paycheck."
This book also educates the reader on swordfish fishing, weather reports, wave heights, the equipment on the Andrea Gail, rogue waves, missing ships, and what happens in your body when you drown. Some may find the beginning of the book to be a little dry, but I was fascinated with it. Who knew I found fishing and boats so interesting? Plus, he is giving us a glimpse into the life of the crew. It also feels weird to say that I enjoyed this book which dealt with tragedy. I thought it was very well done and told the story of known things that occurred when the crew and their boat went missing. We know that the crew did not survive. Junger cannot tell us what happened on the Andrea Gail during the storm, but he does give a good account of what happened before, after and what others reported experiencing during the storm.
"Whatever it is, one thing is know for sure. Around midnight on October 28th-when the storm is at its height off Sable Island-something catastrophic happens abroad the Andrea Gail."
The Crew of the Andrea Gail:
Frank William "Billy" Tyne Jr. (Captain), aged 37
Michael "Bugsy" Moran, aged 36
Dale R. "Murph" Murphy, aged 30
Alfred Pierre, aged 32
Robert F. "Bobby" Shatford, aged 30
David "Sully" Sullivan, aged 29
Tyne's final recorded words were "She's comin' on, boys, and she's comin' on strong."
"He did what ninety percent of us would've done-he battened down the hatches and hung on." says Tommy Barrie, captain of the Allision. "He'd been gone well over a month. He probably just said, 'Screw it, we've had enough of this shit.' and kept heading home."
This book is not only about the men who were lost but about those who tried to save them and others. It is about their family members, their wives and girlfriends, their town, and the love of the sea.
"On November 6, 1991, Andrea Gail's emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) was discovered washed up on the shore of Sable Island in Nova Scotia...Fuel drums, a fuel tank, the EPIRB, an empty life raft, and some other flotsam were the only wreckage ever found." (Taken from Wikipedia)
I found this book to be fascinating and recommend it to anyone who enjoys books about real events, boating, fishing, etc. -
This is a powerful and heart-wrenching true story. Many people are familiar with the movie – I saw it at the theater when it first came out in 2000. But, it wasn’t until now that I finally read it.
It is the story of many different people and how they were affected by the Perfect Storm (also known as The No-Name Storm and the Halloween Gale) in the North Atlantic during Halloween week in 1991. The primary story follows the crew of the Andrea Gail:
The early part of the book is reminiscent of Moby Dick as you learn the ins and outs of sword fishing. During this point it runs a fine line between being fascinating or dragging. Luckily, it is nowhere near as long as Moby Dick so it serves as a nice introduction to the atmosphere of the story.
Then the storm hits:
During the storm part of the book there are several tales of heroic rescues and tragic losses. While the focus at first is on the Andrea Gail, there are many other interesting stories from the North Atlantic.
If you like non-fiction, harrowing tales of nature’s wrath, and stories about people pushed to the very limits of endurance, then I highly recommend this book. Just be sure to bring along your Dramamine! -
"How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?"
This is the heartbreaking true account of the last moments of those aboard the fateful last voyage of the Andrea Gail, the swordfish boat caught in the heart of the ocean during one of the worst storms to hit the North American eastern seaboard, in October 1991.
This book was more of a factual account, attempting to recreate the last days and the possible thoughts and actions of those who sadly lost their lives, rather than an attempt to fictionalize their story. Junger never lets his reader forget that this is a true-life description; achieving this with passages from meteorologists, other fishermen and the loved ones left to mourn those lost at sea. Whilst being dense in the science of storms and the process of life on board a fishing schooner, it is also thick with tragedy and truly does justice to the lost men who can now never be forgotten. -
I am partial to gritty, tough bars where men eye you like they could pick you apart and hardened women wonder whether you would survive. But once the bluster eases, and if you return often, you can be accepted among some of the toughest people alive. It is a toughness tempered by pain, disappointment, suffering, and a zestful appreciation of the rare good times when they arrive. Sebastian Junger wrote “The Perfect Storm” after one tragedy to befall the Gloucester seafaring community in 1991 — though it’s known quite a few. Suffering is in its bones. Hard work is etched in sea-salted streets and in the old floorboards of its 100-year old homes, “where grooves have been worn… by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea.”
The author was once a tree-cutter who sought solace in beers well-earned, sitting in booths in the second roughest bar in Glouchester, called the Nest — the roughest, the Mariner, just down the street. He had already endured those aforementioned glaring looks until, after so many beers over so many weeks, he had finally been tolerated, if not welcomed. But when he heard about this tragedy, he felt a calling to write about it, and yet, was afraid of asking these proud men and women to speak openly about their deeply personal loss. He had imagined walking in and after one question be keelhauled out the front door, and he almost was by one man, but slowly, due to his familiarity and the Nest being like a home to some, he was allowed in, and slowly they opened up to him.
The cruelty of the sea forges the character of the men and women of this town that is clear. Christina (Chris) Cotter, an attractive, brawling, hard-living divorced mother of three, fell in love with young Bobby Shatford, a local boy, father of two, himself getting a divorce. He bartended and fished to pay off court-ordered alimony, and just after he proposed to Chris, he got a berth on the Andrea Gail, the ill-fated fishing vessel that this terrible storm revolves around. While Bobby Shatford looked the part of a quintessential fisherman, his Captain, Billy Tyne, was the man who truly loved to fish. Though the skipper’s pay helped, the pressures of living on land were far more challenging to Billy than the dangers of storms, engine trouble, errant hooks, and any other life-threatening hazard of this brutal profession. True fishermen like Billy are relatively rare, though. Most men heading to sea did so because they were broke, had no other offers, and needed money fast.
The heart of the story of course is knowing the people suffering this harrowing storm, and Sebastian Junger delivers the goods. He dives into their personalities and intimate lives, making this tale feel real and the storm chilling when it arrives. Allowing the reader to get to know the people on the boat makes it seem like we are there with them. The hope for survival only grows as the tale unfolds, especially when the author expands the story to include the lives of countless others on many different vessels in that sea, from a pleasure yacht to a cargo tanker to even a crashed Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter.
While the tempestuous sea had the final word, the author delivered a thrilling account of it.
Check it out. -
I like Junger's writing style a lot. He's very poignant and manages to write in a both matter-of-factly and emotionally sensitive way at the same time. This is the story he could piece together about one particular boat lost at sea, as well as what might have happened to its crew, during one of the worst storms ever recorded. He does this by combining very technical know-how about fishing and boats with an understanding of the psychology behind men's choices to go out at sea and how they deal with survival and death. It is an immensely interesting book for someone like me, who's curious about everything under the sun, but I'm guessing it's also valuable to someone who actually is a fisherman, because it's very adamant in offering correct information. I totally recommend this.
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I couldn’t put it down. I had to keep reading until I finished. A whole variety of background stories, historical perspective, analysis, and best of all gripping adventure. No matter how much you respect the power of the ocean, this book will reinforce your respect. The movie was good, the book is WAY better.
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I thought this would be a pretty interesting book - I had vaguely heard the story when the movie came out, although I haven't seen the movie.
The Perfect Storm is a great name for the book, as the book revolved around the storm that took out the Andrea Gail. It gave a lot of good information about fishing, but overall I wasn't impressed by the book, especially when it concerns the Andrea Gail. The synopsis on the back of the book annoyed me, because I thought the book was going to be entirely about the Andrea Gail, but it instead seemed to be about the storm itself, past storms, and other accidents that happened during the storm.
No one knows what happened on the boat - it was never found. The author did make it clear that what he was writing was just a guess based on other boaters and their experiences, but it was pretty annoying to constantly read "Presumably" and "Probably." -
" A mature hurricane is by far the most powerful event on earth; the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States & the Soviet Union don't contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day." Page 102
I have had The Perfect Storm on my bookcase for quite sometime.
Near the end of " Columbine", the author, Dave Cullen, mentioned that Mr. Junger's description
of the crew of the Andrea Gail & their last hours, was what he strove for when he wrote his book.
He said that the way Mr. Junger described their drowning prompted him to do justice to each victim at Columbine when he wrote his book & so that one sentence made me pick up my copy of The Perfect Storm.
I am glad that I did.
What a read.
I could not stop.
His descriptions of these men & their lives lived on these huge boats was a different world to me.
I could not imagine this.
He went deep into describing how much goes into these shipping~ fishing~ sailing vessels.
I have always felt that there is no force greater than a storming sea.
This book solidifies my view that nothing can contain Mother Nature out upon the ocean.
I enjoyed this read as much as I knew the outcome, I kept reading.
It was also a lesson in nautical history.
A lesson in how our armed forces work hand in hand with these seafaring Americans.
They roll out at a moments notice & risk their own lives and sometimes lose their lives in their attempts.
I found myself wondering how in the world did 18th & 19th century sailors get along?
Amazing.
And to read that men still want nothing more than to spend months upon months on our dangerous oceans, willfully hoping that if a MAYDAY is sounded, someone will come to their rescue.
They live on this hope. They have to.
Reading of the many different rescues, was an eye opener.
I, who faithfully watched each shuttle launch & still do~ had no idea that an Air Guard C130 flies down to Florida to watch the launch, and I did not know that an Air Force rescue crew heads out to Africa to cover the rest of the launch's flight into space... just in case.. AMAZING !!
I found this book just an excellent read.
I always love reading Sebastian Junger's articles in my monthly magazines;
he never fails & here he goes deep~if you excuse the pun.
You can imagine the lives he enters.
It is a different world ~ a transitory existence that seems to work for these seaside villages.
Men who want no possessions and nothing to hold them down.
They live for the open seas.
Men like that still exist.
I kept thinking of Herman Melville's~~~~ " Pierre; or~ The Ambiguities "
“for
in tremendous
extremities
human souls
are
like
drowning men
well
enough ~
they know
they are in peril~
well
enough ~
they
know
the causes
of that peril~
~~nevertheless~~
the Sea is the Sea
& these
drowning
men
do
drown.”
~~~~~~~~~~~ -
"Perfect," of course, means perfectly disastrous. A Nor'easter forms when a tropical low meets a Canadian arctic blast, which intensifies the storm and creates a whopper whether in the North Atlantic, off the Northeast US coast, or inland. In late October, 1991, a seasonal Nor'easter became even more powerful by picking up energy from disintegrating Hurricane Grace: a Perfect Storm. Sebastian Junger's superlative telling of the real-life event, which resulted in this 1997 book and the 2000 movie starring George Clooney, reveals the storm in its horrific destruction -- also the mixed results of rescue efforts that come when governmental resources are stretched a little too far.
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea goes into matters that the Clooney film simply couldn't spend much time on, such as the way a private pleasure boat apparently distracted rescue efforts from the fishing boat Andrea Gail, also the extent to which the profit motive endangered the Andrea Gail to a larger extent than was strictly necessary. Another factor -- in the way of update -- was that the Loran system of ship identification was allowed to die a few years ago, to be replaced by GPS. It remains to be seen whether that budget-based decision was wise or not. What is indisputable is that this is a fine, gripping book, and should be read by those who have seen the movie as well as those who haven't.
Image: The "Andrea Gail" fishing boat:
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"All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had five thousand years ago." - Moby Dick.
I have a special bond with this story. My first encounter with "The Perfect Storm" was through watching the movie. I still remember that movie clearly on my mind even though I haven't watched it for a few years now. It's even easily in my top-ten favorite movies of all time list. I simply loved it. As a child I had always been terrified of the ocean and all its dangers. Strangely though, I was in-love with the concept of fishing even though I didn't like fish too much. I remember watching the movie as a kid and considering the possibility of becoming a fisherman. Yup, I had those daydreams. I would wait a decade before I would find out about the book. A few weeks ago, I was scouring Rob Ermita's Book Sale, as I always do when I feel the need to read a real book. After reading a few books from my Kindle, I'd often feel hollow, and I'd end up looking for solid, empirical, tree-destroying, ink-drinking books. I was shaken when I first saw the book. That one of my favorite stories of all time was a book and I had no idea about it. How it was able to elude me all these years remains such a great mystery to me. Before we continue on, I feel the need to remind you that this book is not a work of fiction, this is a true story.
"Meteorologists see perfection in strange things," Junger writes, "and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm." This powerful book is a chilling, daunting, experience at one of the greatest forces of nature the world has ever seen and the lives of people it had on its mercy.
"To be out at sea in the path of such an event would be a catastrophic experience. And so it evidently proved for the six men aboard the Andrea Gail, a 72-foot swordfish boat that disappeared off the coast of Nova Scotia on Oct. 28, leaving behind only fuel drums, a propane tank and sundry radio equipment that were found weeks later. To dramatize the incredible fury of a severe storm at sea, Junger reconstructs the fatal voyage of the Andrea Gail.
How does he manage to do this with no survivors to interview and with no details available about the ship's final hours of existence? A good deal is known up to a certain point: the layout of the Andrea Gail; the routine of a previous outing; how the crew members spent their time before leaving Gloucester, Mass., their home port; the pressure they were under to fill their hold with swordfish; the high risk of injury or death in the business; the bad feelings about the coming trip that drove two crew members to walk away before it began.
Junger nicely paces his narrative by interrupting it with histories of Gloucester, of the New England fishing industry and its gradual decline, and of the development of long-line fishing -- dragging a 40-mile-long monofilament with up to 1,000 baited hooks.
He creates a distinct atmosphere when he writes: "At dinner the crew talk about what men everywhere talk about -- women, lack of women, kids, sports, horse racing, money, lack of money, work. They talk a lot about work; they talk about it the way men in prison talk about time. Work is what's keeping them from going home, and they all want to go home." You can sense the coming storm when he writes: "The sunset is a bloody rust-red on a sharp autumn horizon, and the night comes in fast with a northwest wind and a sky riveted with stars. There's no sound but the smack of water on steel and the heavy gargle of the diesel engine."
For information beyond what is known of the Andrea Gail's destruction, Junger turns to "people who had been through similar situations and survived." From such interviews he learns what an 80-mile-an-hour wind sounds like and what it feels like to be tossed by waves 100 feet high.
Perhaps most compelling of all, he explains in concrete detail why hurricanes blow, how waves rise, what happens to boats in a storm and the way human beings drown. Thus he is able to reconstruct what he calls "the zero-moment point." When drowning, he writes in this frightening chapter, "the body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat." He concludes, "Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water." The crew members of the Andrea Gail "are dead."
After this calamity, the narrative of "The Perfect Storm" abruptly shifts its focus to describe a couple of heart-stopping rescue attempts, one of them successful, the other a costly fiasco by pararescue teams from the New York State Air National Guard. What is particularly impressive here is the dedication of professional storm watchers to save any human life at sea, no matter what foolishness or bad luck led to the trouble.
Despite the upbeat ending of "The Perfect Storm," what lingers is a sense of the cruel indifference of nature. One chapter's epigraph quotes "Moby-Dick": "All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had five thousand years ago."
Even more chilling is the lack of closure that the families of the victims experienced. Junger writes: "If the men on the 'Andrea Gail' had simply died, and their bodies were lying in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on with their lives. But they didn't die, they disappeared off the face of the earth and, strictly speaking, it's just a matter of faith that these men will never return. Such faith takes work, it takes effort. The people of Gloucester must willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another world.
To have to strive for a belief in death and oblivion: a perfect conclusion to "The Perfect Storm."
-NY Times Book Review
This book is a testament to the nature's power, and it is fitting. Awe is all I can use to describe what this fine piece of Journalism offers.
"She's a beautiful lady, one guy said jerking his thumb oceanward out the bar door, but she'll kill ya without a second thought." -
I had mixed feelings about this book, but I would recommend it to just about anyone. The history and dangers of commercial fishing off the treacherous waters of New England/the north Atlantic are well expounded; full of fascinating facts and anecdotes. But Junger was faced with a fundamental problem with this book that I'm not sure he was able to overcome satisfactorily: and that's that he spends a good deal of time getting us intimate with a large cast of characters--the fishermen and loved ones affiliated with the ill-fated boat, Andrea Gail--and because nothing is really known about went on aboard a vessel that went down with barely a trace, without a word and no eyewitnesses to what happened, there's a big hole of speculation in the middle that Junger does, admittedly, a yeoman's job of trying to fill by extrapolation from the documented experiences of the surviving crewman of other boats that have gone down in sea storms. Ironically and oddly, he tells very detailed stories of survival and rescues during the same storm of characters who we don't get to know with the same level of intimacy as afforded those folks of the Andrea Gail. So we get to know a lot about people who had an adventure we know little or nothing of, but get great detail of the adventures of people who we get to know little about. There seems to be a certain imbalance in that. Even so, this was a very good book; a solid read; and I love anything that smacks of truelife sea adventure and survival.
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It took me a little while to get into this book, but I'm really glad I did. The last third was so powerful that I'm getting goosebumps writing this review. A Perfect Storm was packed full of information on the fishing industry, weather formation, and culture of fishing villages. I was more interested in the tales of rescue, survival and loss, which the book also delivers on.
The format of this book didn't match my initial expectations; it is not a single linear story, even though it seemed that way at the beginning. There are some technical and lengthy passages in the middle that made me wonder if I had the patience to read a historian's thesis on the fishing industry. (Ummm, no. The answer is no.)
But none of that matters because I made it to the 60% mark, at which I could not put the book down.What was happening was not a terror beyond words. It was a grim sense of reality, a scrambling to figure out what to do next, a determination to stay alive and keep other people alive, and an awareness of the dark noisy slamming of the boat. But it wasn’t a terror beyond words. I just had an overwhelming sense of knowing we weren’t going to make it.
Without revealing too much, I'll just say that some of the passages in the last part of the book will stay with me forever. I'm also in awe/shock at the dangers that people face working in the industry. If you know any fishermen or women, give them a big hug. Right now. -
Since the Mayflower, my relatives were fisherman around Gloucester, making this book a fascinating read for me. I remember my great grandfather talking about cod fishing on the Grand Banks and the storms that sank friends' boats. Not long after I read the book, I was staying in a bed and breakfast in the small town of Scituate down the Massachusettes coast, and the movie was playing in a tiny theater across the street, so I went. When I came out, it was pitch black and a huge thunderstorm had come ashore. How eerie! If you liked the book and visit Gloucester, it's much like it's been for decades; still a small fishing town, albeit a poorer one since most of the cod have been fished out. Gloucester was where the first schooners were made; I've got a picture of my great grandfather's two masted schooner. They raced them, especially against the schooners of Halifax. They usually won until 1921 when the Bluenose was built in Nova Scotia which reigned undefeated for 16 years. Fascinating stuff!
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I absolutely hated this book. It's just over 200 pages but it took me more than three weeks to force myself to complete it; I hated the author's style so much that whenever I could bring myself to read a few pages, I started looking for something to distract me.
Beyond stylistic preferences, I had problems with its structure. First off, it was entirely written in the present tense, making it sound like a sports play-by-play commentary. This is a very clumsy approach; the only thing worse is writing from a second person viewpoint, something that almost never works even in short form writing. It's awkward. Ungainly. Annoying.
The author was also fond of extreme hyperbole, and contradicts himself frequently, such as (as a loose paraphrase) "When this type of condition meets that kind of front, then such and such happens. But that never happens." (If that was supposed to be black humor, it failed on both counts.) The worst occurance of this was when he contradicted his actual narrative, as on pp. 180-181 (original 1997 hardcover edition, less than halfway through the "Into the Abyss" chapter). Junger spent two paragraphs explaining that weather condition updates were channeled across three points (ships, Suffolk AFB and McGuire AFB), but only if specifically asked for. McGuire only communicated with Suffolk if Suffolk asked for updates. Likewise, Suffolk only gave craft updates if they asked and Suffolk only asked McGuire if a pilot asked them for updates. Then he repeated it: "Suffolk never calls McGuire for an update, though, because the tanker pilot never asks for one; and McGuire never volunteers the information because they don't know there is an Air Guard helicopter out there in the first place." [Emphasis mine.] Repeating this scenario yet again, the very next line is "...the tanker pilot calls Suffolk for a weather update..." So which was it? The pilot called and Suffolk failed to ask McGuire for an update, or the pilot failed to ask Suffolk?
Finally, by the end of the book Junger turned the whole thing into a ghost story, complete with clairvoyance and spectral visitations by the dead crews. He didn't report that some family members believed they saw ghosts, he gave this mumbo-jumbo credence by reporting the alleged incidents as factual events.
I have all due sympathy for the people who lost friends and family in that storm, and for the dead themselves, but it's pretty irresponsible to take what is ostensibly purported to be a historical account, sticking only to established, documented facts and then inserting woo crap like that.
Fine, Mr. Junger has won awards for his writing. Based on this I don't understand that, but I accept that. In spite of my problems with his prose, I certainly concede the overall importance of telling this story, that's why I persevered to the end. I just wish it had been told better, and I don't think I'll tackle any of his other books or articles. -
Such a fascinating and gut wrenching account of a storm that affected so many lives. An odd half documentary/half story-telling feel to it and as it doesn’t try to fictionalize anything allows the reader to come to her own conclusion about the final moments of the Andrea Gail. It starts out strong, gets a bit too technical in the middle, but finishes as a page turner with true accounts from others who survived the storm. All in all, a really great book.
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I had heard that this book was good but I thought it was sort of boring. I don't know anything about boating and I think you have to have some boating knowledge before reading this book. There are pages and pages of descriptions about what a swordfishing boat looks like, using words I had never even heard of! It would have been helpful if there was a diagram of the boat, just as there was a map of the Atlantic at the beginning of the book that was a great reference. What I did like about the book though was that it was journalistic non-fiction, as much as could be considering the author was guessing (based on others' accounts) what was happening as the boat was going down. It also made me realize how scary being on the open sea must be in a storm.
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"More people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States."
What a tragic, but true story. The author did a good job capturing the feel of the fishing culture. It was technical, but interesting how the science of the weather and the science of the fishing industry came together to make this perfect (the book even defined perfect as something NOT good) storm. I was enthralled the entire time, even though I knew how the story ended. A great book for me. -
This is a review of the audio book which I downloaded for free from the Sync Audio summer reading program last summer. (If you haven't had a chance to use this program, go to
http://audiobooksync.com/ and register).
Remember that movie with George Clooney and Mark Walhberg? This is the book that inspired that movie. While the book doesn't really have any sexy movie stars, it does pay homage to the fishermen and rescue workers alike. The Perfect Storm is the story of the Andrea Gale, a fishing boat that set out in October 1991 and never returned.
At first I found the audio a little tedious. There's a lot of information on the fishery, about the boats, and the fishermen. Fishing is a difficult job - a lot of time away from home, isolated, and subject to nature's whims.
I did enjoy the rescue aspect and at this point I appreciated all the details. My hat goes off to all the people who are trained in Maritime search and rescue.
Highly recommended. -
This was pretty good and read really quickly, especially toward the end. The quite drawn-out description of what it's like to drown was terrifying, as well as the description of what the ocean is like in a storm like that. I'm scared of the ocean so I found it oddly fascinating in a horrific way. I also thought that the very real importance of dreams and premonitions was described in the book--crewmen would get a "bad feeling" about going out with a boat and family members would dream about loved ones who were in peril or lost. Overall, there's something weird about reading something so gripping about something so tragic that's a real story--it feels exploitative to be that interested in how it all happened. But the author does a nice job of respecting the family members and the memory of the people who died.
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One of my all time favorite reads. I love the ocean and stories about it. This one holds a bit of imagination into what may have happened out there at sea in a crazy storm. I really like this book and have read it multiple times.
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*My brother recommending me this*
Me: I don't want a super depressing book
Him: It's not depressing if you support swordfish and h8 fishermen
Y'all 🤣💀 I can't -
I read this book the first time shortly after it was published and thoroughly enjoyed it. A couple of decades later it was just as good. On the surface, this is a strange idea. It’s an attempt to describe a horrifically powerful storm that struck the Atlantic off the northeast coast and sank a fishing boat, killing its crew. In reality it’s a window into the highly dangerous world of deep-sea fishing with in-depth analysis of the dangers the men and women in the trade encounter. Along the way it throws in a history of the industry, descriptions of the lives of the fishers, and a lot of information on storms and the coast guard rescue operations. This is a very interesting book.
If you liked this review, you can find more at
www.gilbertstack.com/reviews. -
Grāmata par gadsimta lielāko vētru, par tunču zvejniekiem un glābšanu jūrā. Taču viss par ko varēju domāt, cik milzīgos apmēros tiek izzvejotas zivis. Tas viss lielas naudas dēļ, kas lielākoties tiek notērēta vietējā krogā pēc zvejas. Autors to labi aprakstīja jau grāmatas sākumā. Pēc tam viņš stāstīja par pašiem zvejniekiem un cik grūts un bīstams darbs viņiem, cik traki ir kad pazūd jūrā, taču tas mani galīgi vairs nespēja iežèlināt un just viņiem līdzi.
Pašu glābēju glābšana gan bija forša. -
It tells the true story of a trawler, the Andrea Gail, which went out on a six-week trip to fish for tuna from Massachusetts and encountered a massive storm caused by the freak meeting of two weather fronts.
On that night, with rain lashing at the windows, my imagination was entirely caught up in this account of real events and the relationships between the men who live this strange and dangerous life. From page one, there is a sense of doom, but this makes the almost bland, matter-of-fact tone all the more powerful. It is a book devoid of sentimentality, but somehow full of feeling.
At the beginning of each chapter, there is some kind of quote. Sometimes I find this habit a bit pretentious, an after-thought designed to connect the writer with greater ones, but in The Perfect Storm the quotes fit perfectly. Many are from the Bible (the terrifying movement of the sea is entirely biblical in scale) and several from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: "All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had five thousand years ago."
It was this sense of the relentless power of the elements that overwhelmed me as I finished reading, and the almost callous way in which the crew were treated by the sea: "They didn't die, they disappeared off the face of the earth." The men may have vanished, but this book means that they will never be forgotten - and the memory of those hours when I read it remains a very sharp one. -
Not a huge fan of how he organized this book because describing these different things like the fishing industry, hurricanes, drowning, etc. really took away from the main characters. As a reader I became very confused when he would start to describe a crisis on the sea but then suddenly switch to describing someones background/personality. It made no sense and I didn't like that about it. I also don't think he should've included the story about the Andrea Gail bc to me it really took away from his ethos instead of strengthening it. Junger didn't have enough evidence about what really happened on that ship to make all these claims about fishing.
Overall the book wasn't awful; it was pretty easy to get through besides the poor organization and that's why I'm only giving it three stars. -
After turning the last page of this book I had to take a deep breath and stretch my tense muscles. Moments ago I was in the cold ocean with a handful of men. I was with a little boy missing his father. I was dreaming about a lover lost at sea. This book takes the reader with it. It's a book you experience rather than read.
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Top Notch Non Fiction read.
Heartbreaking and educational
