The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

by SebastianJunger (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $6.41

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.70

  The perfect storm was a once-in-a-hundred-years combination: a high-pressure system from the Great Lakes running into storm winds over an Atlantic island - Sable Island - and colliding with a weather system from the Caribbean - Hurricane Grace . This is the story of that storm, told through the accounts of fishermen at sea caught up in the maelstrom, of their families waiting anxiously for news, and of the rescue services. It is the story of the old battle between fishermen and the ocean, between man and nature; but here nature is an awesome and capricious power that transforms the surface of the Atlantic into an impossible tumult of water walls and gaping voids, and with the capacity to break an oil tanker in two, let alone the 72-foot sword-fishing boat Andrea Gail , with her crew of eight. A typical hurricane encompasses 1,000,000 cubic miles of atmosphere and can contain enough energy (in theory, for a hurricane will not be controlled) to meet the electric-power needs of the UK for a decade. This book describes what happened when the Andrea Gail looked into the wrathful face of such a phenomenon.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.72

  The phenomenal bestseller, in a specially priced hardcover with movie-art bellyband to accompany the major motion picture to be released June 30, 2000 and starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Diane Lane, and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Drifting down on swimmers is standard rescue procedure, but the seas are so violent that Buschor keeps getting flung out of reach. There are times when he's thirty feet higher than the men trying to rescue him. . . . [I]f the boat's not going to Buschor, Buschor's going to have to go to it. SWIM! they scream over the rail. SWIM! Buschor rips off his gloves and hood and starts swimming for his life. It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high--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 comm' on, boys, and she's comm' on strong, radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrea Gail off the coast of Nova Scotia, and soon afterward the boat and its crew of six disappeared without a trace. In a narrative taut with the fury of the elements, Sebastian Junger takes us deep into the heart of the storm, depicting with vivid detail the courage, terror, and awe that surface in such a gale. Junger illuminates a world of swordfishermen consumed by the dangerous but lucrative trade of offshore fishing-- a young man's game, a single man's game --and gives us a glimpse of their lives in the tough fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts; he recreates the last moments of the Andrea Gail crew and recounts the daring high-seas rescues that made heroes of some and victims of others; and he weaves together the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that leaves us with the taste of salt air on our tongues and a breathless sense of what it feels like to be caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control. We know on the strength of this stark and compelling journey into the dark heart of nature, what it feels like to drown.