Summary and Reviews of The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger

Media Reviews

Boston Globe Mesmerizing....Packs an emotional wallop.

Entertainment Weekly Guaranteed to blow readers away...A+.

LA Times Book Review A wild ride that brilliantly captures the awesome power of the raging sea.

Newsweek - David Gates As with any true-adventure story, you wonder if you ought to be getting such a bang out of real people's real suffering. But in The Perfect Storm, we're sharers, not voyeurs. The book is a humanizing reminder that we, too, could -- probably will -- be called on to bear more than we could possibly imagine.

Philadelphia Inquirer Takes readers into the maelstrom and shows nature's splendid and dangerous havoc at its utmost.

Time Magazine - John Snow What gives his narration its blood and bones, however, is the fine, boozy picture he sketches of the fishermen's bars of Gloucester, Mass., the Andrea Gail's home port. For the younger fishermen, the bars are home and family in the short weeks between the month-long voyages to the Grand Banks. They make good money, $4,000 or $5,000 a trip, and buy a lot of drinks. . . . The book's epigraph, from Sir Walter Scott, has it right 'It's no fish ye're buying, it's men's lives.'

Publishers Weekly In meteorological jargon, a perfect storm is one unsurpassed in ferocity and duration a description that fits the so-called Halloween Gale of October 1991 in the western Atlantic. Junger, who has written for American Heritage and Outside, masterfully handles his account of that storm and its devastation. He begins with a look at the seedy town of Gloucester, Mass., which has been sliding downhill ever since the North Atlantic fishing industry declined, then focuses his attention on the captain and the five-man crew of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing vessel. He then charts the storm particularly formidable because three storms had converged from the south, the west and the north that created winds up to 100 miles an hour and waves that topped 110 feet. He reconstructs what the situation must have been aboard the ship during the final hours of its losing battle with the sea, and the moments when it went down with the loss of all hands. He recaps the courageous flight of an Air National Guard helicopter, which had to be ditched in the ocean leaving one man dead while the other four were rescued then returns to Gloucester and describes the reaction to the loss of the Andrea Gail. Even with the inclusion of technical information, this tale of the Storm of the Century is a thrilling read and seems a natural for filming.