Friday, October 5, 2007

The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger



The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger
299 pages
Finished 10/3/07












I thought this would be a pretty interesting book - I had vaguely heard the story when the movie came out, although I don't remember ever watching 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 where 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.

My biggest issue is that no one actually knows what happened on the boat/to 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." The Andrea Gail story was basically assumptions about what the Captain and crew decided and did while the ship was going down. I don't consider that nonfiction.
I give it one and a half stars.

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