Customer Reviews
Unsentimental, Inexorable, Factual - By: M. BRINSLEY-MOTTO, 16 Aug 2008 
The book ably reconstructs the terrifying facts, feelings & tragedy of the fishing boat Andrea Gail & her six-man crew, which disappeared during a killing storm of mythic proportions. Tragically, the bodies were never found, so nobody survived to tell the story. The book weaves a compelling patchwork around the sinking itself--the ship's colourful crew, their manic drives, lives & backgrounds. There are fascinating details of meterology, navigation & commercial fishing. We peer into the physics of rogue waves, the horrifying physiology of drowning, the agonies of search & rescue. We feel the adrenal charge of risk-fishing, the frailty of humans pitted against Nature, the lash of wind, the brine, the towering waves, the violent pitch & toss of the sea, told with the crackling force & energy of a first novel. The writing is tight, plain, elegant & restrained. Junger is ever the journalist, always tethered to his materials, never sensational, never indulging himself, or setting free the novelist. Perhaps his stern, disciplined self-control is his greatest triumph. I thoroughly enjoyed the book & would gladly read it again.
Highly recommended even if you don't like swordfish - By: A. Gothorp, 20 Sep 2007 This book was the inspiration for the 2000 film of the same name. The book follows the ill-fated fishing trip made by the Andrea Gailin October 1991.
Here you can find everything you ever wanted to know about swordfishing & the men who risk their lives on the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland. This is an excellent slice of life depiction of the type of people who are driven to risk their lives at sea. Based on a true event & only fictionalised because the author has constructed the story from secondary sources.
The book reads as a tribute to some very brave men & also to an industry which saw the introduction of quotas around the time of this story to preserve fish stocks.
Often people go for self-help type books to find inspiration, but I find if you read books like this that tell you what some people go through to make ends meet then it puts your own situationin perspective.
Although the ultimate fate of the Andrea Gail is unknown the book also contains some excellent first hand accounts of the activities of the US Coast Guard.
Forget the film - By: Secret Squirrel, 12 Jul 2007 
This is just so much better. The best book i've ever read about the sea. And fishing. And air sea rescue. And the weather ! Even such mundane tasks as the fishing crew going shopping for their supplies seemed interesting.
"What was the final moment? What was the final,final thing?" - By: Mary Whipple, 10 Mar 2006 Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm is a masterpiece of "disaster writing," writtenin a crisply paced, masculine style while still incorporating much scientific detail about the meteorology of this "perfect" storm of October 28, 1991, & the physical forces it unleashed on the Andrea Gale, a seventy-foot commercial boat, fishing for swordfish at the end of the season, near Georges Bank. The result is the gripping story of Capt. Billy Tyne & five Gloucester fishermen who ran into the "perfect" conjunction of three major storms & never returned.
Junger begins his story with the maritime history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a city from which over ten thousand men have perished at sea since the fishing industry beganin 1650. Gloucester fishermen & their families are extremely close, & The Crow's Nest bar, vividly described here, is their "homeport" between trips &in times of emergency. To gain insight into the character of Gloucester & its fishing fleet, Junger lived above the Crow's Nestin Bobby Shatford's room while he did his research, became friends with Bobby's mother, who was a bartender at there, came to know & like the regulars, & gained confidences shared with few "outsiders."
As Junger introduces the six men aboard the Andrea Gail, he shows their both their lives & their motivations for going out on one last trip, which would bring thousands of dollars to each crew member, if successful. At the same time, he also presents technical information about fishing boats & how they are engineered, the changesin the center of gravity which occurred on the Andrea Gail with the addition of a "whaleback" storage area on deck, the science of long-line sword-fishing, & the daily lives of the men aboard.
Six other boatsin the same area off Cape Cod at about the same time as the Andrea Gail report on their boats' terrifying behavior during this unexpected storm, allowing the reader to imagine the various tragedies that might have happened aboard the Andrea Gail. The Coast Guard rescue of three crew members from a large sailboat (which almost cost the lives of three rescuers) shows the ferocity of the storm & the near impossibility of rescuing the Andrea Gail's crew, even if they had been foundin time. Filled with the kind of detail which brings this "perfect," hundred-year storm to heart-pounding life, The Perfect Storm is a gripping story which honors these fishermen without exploiting them or their families--a classic story of maritime disaster. Mary Whipple
"What was the final moment? What was the final,final thing?" - By: Mary Whipple, 11 Feb 2006 Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm is a masterpiece of "disaster writing," writtenin a crisply paced, masculine style while still incorporating much scientific detail about the meteorology of this "perfect" storm of October 28, 1991, & the physical forces it unleashed on the Andrea Gale, a seventy-foot commercial boat, fishing for swordfish at the end of the season, near Georges Bank. The result is the gripping story of Capt. Billy Tyne & five Gloucester fishermen who ran into the "perfect" conjunction of three major storms & never returned.
Junger begins his story with the maritime history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a city from which over ten thousand men have perished at sea since the fishing industry beganin 1650. Gloucester fishermen & their families are extremely close, & The Crow's Nest bar, vividly described here, is their "homeport" between trips &in times of emergency. To gain insight into the character of Gloucester & its fishing fleet, Junger lived above the Crow's Nestin Bobby Shatford's room while he did his research, became friends with Bobby's mother, who was a bartender at there, came to know & like the regulars, & gained confidences shared with few "outsiders."
As Junger introduces the six men aboard the Andrea Gail, he shows their both their lives & their motivations for going out on one last trip, which would bring thousands of dollars to each crew member, if successful. At the same time, he also presents technical information about fishing boats & how they are engineered, the changesin the center of gravity which occurred on the Andrea Gail with the addition of a "whaleback" storage area on deck, the science of long-line sword-fishing, & the daily lives of the men aboard.
Six other boatsin the same area off Cape Cod at about the same time as the Andrea Gail report on their boats' terrifying behavior during this unexpected storm, allowing the reader to imagine the various tragedies that might have happened aboard the Andrea Gail. The Coast Guard rescue of three crew members from a large sailboat (which almost cost the lives of three rescuers) shows the ferocity of the storm & the near impossibility of rescuing the Andrea Gail's crew, even if they had been foundin time. Filled with the kind of detail which brings this "perfect," hundred-year storm to heart-pounding life, The Perfect Storm is a gripping story which honors these fishermen without exploiting them or their families--a classic story of maritime disaster. Mary Whipple
