Customer Reviews
Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on a wide wide sea - By: Mr. O. Buxton, 26 Jan 2008 
This is a wonderful book about a truly remarkable, moving & literally tragic misadventure. I first stumbled across Donald Crowhurst's story through a terrific Channel 4 feature film, Deep Water, & was so captivated by it that I bought this & another account of the race (fellow competitor Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way (which, for the record, doesn't really touch on the Crowhurst story)).
The Bard himself could not have scripted a tragedy better than this. Crowhurst, a mercurial but fundamentally unremarkable director of a struggling electronics business, hits upon a means of saving his business & assuring his family's future: entering (and winning) the 1968 Sunday Times single-handed non-stop round-the-world yacht race.
Yes; quite.
Not only, he rationalises, will his entry publicise his firm's own brand of navigational equipment, but the £5000 prize will satisfy an ever more anxious major creditor. His plan to win, cobbled together from a standing startin six months, is to use an (at the time) almost unheard-of design: the trimaran, substantially of his own specification.
No matter that, a weekend yachtsman, Crowhurst has never been out of the Solent & has no realistic chance of beating the hoary old sea-dogs, renowned explorers & ex-navy officers already signed up for the race. No matter that preparing the boat involves raising further finance from the same major creditor who was already breathing down Crowhurst's neck (you do have to wonder what *he* was thinking, don't you). No matter that there is no time to have the boat properly finished, let alone thoroughly ocean-trialled.
And thereafter a perfect, inevitable, tragedy unfolds. Crowhurst is carried by events, some of his own making, to prosecute a plan it is plain, even to him, is madness. But events & circumstances spur him on. A BBC film crew is following him. A rather over-excited publicist inflates expectations. Before he knows it, Crowhurst is off the coast of Portugalin a slow, leaking, malfunctioning, poorly provisioned boat, fearing for his life if he should go on, & for his solvency & marriage should he not. He realises there his no hope of success, but is compellingly obliged to soldier on, stiff upper lip, & makes the hasty & fatal decision to exaggerate his progress. From that point on, fortune's wheel is set.
The ironies & twists of fate which thereafter play out & force events to their sorry conclusion are so cruel that one can hardly blame Crowhurst for reneging on a lifetime's atheism & laying his plight at the hands of a malicious (and game-playing) God. The saddest irony of all was the last: Crowhurst, never intending to do anything but comein a respectable but uninteresting last, announces (to add some drama!), that he is closing on the last remaining competitor who,in panic, redoubles his efforts to coax his own damaged, worn out & jury-rigged boat faster, causing it to break up entirely & sink - leaving Crowhurst to win (if he arrives home at all) by default - the one thing he simply cannot afford to do.
Tomalin & Hall's book, which came out within a year of the original event, is an expertly pieced-together & beautifully written forensic study of the whole awful saga, & charts sympathetically & extensively Crowhurst's descent into what they assume (plausibly enough to me) to have been a form of paranoid schizophrenia by the end of his life. The relation of Crowhurst's final plunge into the abyss, & his final burst of energyin recording his cosmic revelation is by turns dreadful & somehow uplifting: here is a hero going outin true Nietzschean style with the psychology of the tragic poet: "Not so as to get rid of pity & terror ... but beyond pity & terror, to realisein oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses the joyin destruction"
Olly Buxton
Unputdownable - By: Debbie King, 17 Jan 2008 I read this bookin two evenings flat - I couldn't put it down. It is the definitive account of the life of Donald Crowhurst & his weird & tragic voyage. Despite the fact that he tried to 'cheat' you cannot help but feel sorry for the man, & especially his family.
The maps, photos & diagrams are all well-explained & the excerpts from the logbooks riveting.
There are so many twists, turns & ironiesin the 'plot' that the book would have been a great work of fiction. It is made all the more amazing by the fact that it all really happened.
A thoroughly excellent read.
If we look deeply inside ourselves, what would we see? - By: A. Currah, 25 Aug 2007 I have read this superb book on many occasions & each time it makes me a little uncomfortable. Why? Becausein many ways I identify myselfin it, & I suspect many others will feel the same way. The need to feel accepted by your peers, to be on the same level as them & fit in. And the feeling that the only way to achieve it is to do something as extraordinary & mad as Donald Crowhurst did.
In this day & age of multi million pound yacht racing with their sleek sexy boats & electronic gizmos, hourly GPS assisted position reports, the sponsors name emblazoned on everything from the hull to the sunglasses worn by the crew, it is easy to forget that until as recently as the late 60`s, small boat circumnavigations were a journey into the unknown, the people who did it (or try to do it) genuine explorers. These people set off knowing that if their boat foundered, the chance of rescue was extremely slim. Donald Crowhurst was one of these people.
This book starts with a comprehensive look at Crowhursts early life, & it is here that the first seeds of the later tragedy were sown. When the doomed voyage finally gets underway, the authors Tomalin & Hall expertly unravel what is going on inside Crowhursts head from the very few clues he left behind.
Donald Crowhurst was left deeply trappedin a lose/lose situation of his own making. This book reveals chillingly how he tried to make sense of his self induced impossible predicament, &in the end tragically couldn`t.
If you only ever read one bookin your life, make sure this is it.
Beautiful madness in a mad world - By: , 17 Jun 2004 An account from the logbooks of sailor Donald Crowhurst who attempted to sail non-stop, single-handed around the world as part of a boat race. All looked remarkably good for the enthusiastic amateur, when after 240 days at sea he was within two weeks of a triumphant return. But then he disappeared.
This was 1969. Before the sophisticated tracking used to check a vessel's progress, & all was taken as fact from the sailors logbooks. This is an account of what happened to a man hopelessly out of his depth, with the weight of expectation hanging heavy over him, & no-one but his unravelling mind for company.
Quite simply a breath-taking & engrossing account of human failing & folly with the ability to stir up question marks within the story & one-self.
An important story and a wonderful book - By: , 10 Sep 2000 Although Sir Francis Chichester called this, with justice, "the sea drama of the century", it really is not so much a "sea drama" as a human drama that takes place at sea. The subject, Donald Crowhurst, finds himself at seain more ways than one, & the reader is rivetted as the plot thickens & various developments take him further into danger. His story is masterfully presented by highly gifted authors, who are right when they claim to provide the evidence by which the reader may form his own judgements, which may differ from theirs (as mine doesin certain particulars &in my understanding of Crowhurst's affliction). The writing is crisp, lively, & focussed; the authors deserve full credit for taking their subject seriously & giving him the painstaking attention that he--and his paper trail of hope & suffering--clearly warranted. Again, this book is not primarily about the sea or sailing, though there's plenty of detailin that respect, very interesting even for a non-sailor. Crowhurst's story is really about making hard choices, or more particularly, about making a terrible choice at a critical moment, when everything seems to hangin the balance & when "every way you look at it, you lose". It is this crisis, grappled with so earnestly & heartbreakingly by Donald Crowhurst, that makes the book worthwhile, profound, & timeless.
