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

It doesn't take Sebastian Junger's quotations from Moby-Dick and the Bible, used to open some of his chapters in The Perfect Storm, to make you realise that the sea and the men who navigate it has long been fertile ground for literary endeavours. The true story recorded in Junger's breakout piece of narrative journalism would be innately fascinating told by any hand: a crew of six hardened fishermen aboard a small commercial fishing vessel find themselves at the mercy of a once-in-a-century "meteorological hell" (pg. 104) in the open Atlantic. A storm – the "perfect storm", in fact (pg. 150) – a confluence of various extreme weather fronts over our doomed everymen, including a hurricane, that ultimately sinks the Andrea Gail and its show more occupants without trace.

That the ship and its men are lost is not a spoiler, for want of a better term, for how could it be otherwise? Junger goes into great detail about the circumstances surrounding the loss of the Andrea Gail and its souls: how such a 'perfect' storm brewed; about so-called 'rogue' waves and how even top-of-the-line ships can have their backs broken by them; about how oil tankers and even aircraft carriers would be at risk faced with a single big wave, let alone a small fishing boat facing countless numbers of them, from all directions, relentlessly over the course of many hours.

A mere recitation of some of the facts Junger unpacks is mind-boggling: "the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don't contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day" (pg. 102); on one large ship, the storm peeled shipping containers "open like sardine cans, forty feet above the surface" (pg. 114); during a rescue elsewhere in the storm, the waves took the man in the water thirty feet higher than the rescuers in a hovering helicopter (pg. 197). The waves in the Perfect Storm topped 100 feet, among the highest waves ever recorded (pg. 119). There may well have been higher ones throughout history, but they are so unpredictable and so devastating that those who likely encountered them did not live to tell it. I read part of Junger's book at work, in the break-room of my office building, and was stunned to realise, looking down, that the waves which struck the men of the Andrea Gail would be almost twice as high as from where I stood. I'm not of a mind to quit my desk job and join the fishing fleet, let me tell you.

I took my time reading the book, because even the contemplation of any single part of this scenario is frightening. To know that these people – real people, to those lives Junger devotes many pages – actually faced that, at their end, in the dark, is unimaginable. Junger, nevertheless, undertakes a number of strategies to bridge the imagination gap. His account of the final moments of the Andrea Gail, he freely admits, can only be conjecture, but he bases his conjecture on research and on the experiences of those who survived similar events, including fishermen who counted the men of the Andrea Gail among their friends. He supplements this with in-depth yet readable information on sword-fishing, search-and-rescue, and meteorology. By the time the reader finishes the book, Junger has given them so much relevant information that even the most complacent reader no longer wonders how mere water and wind could sink a modern sea-going vessel. In fact, the reader likely goes to the opposite extreme, and wonders how or why any man would ever choose to lose sight of shore. When we first read, on page 70, of how "more people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States", we think of possible negligence and safety measures and technological advances. By the end, we look back on that quote and reach, like the fishermen often do, for superstition, fate, and a primal respect for the naked forces which brawl across the world.

Junger supplements his account of the men of the Andrea Gail with other "nightmarish, white-knuckle business" which took place during the Perfect Storm (pg. 182), not least the afore-mentioned helicopter rescue. Knowing that other men died during the storm helps provide some perspective: this is not a romance of the sea, a tragic tale that affected the Andrea Gail especially, the ship a unique icon marked out for some moral lesson about the hubris of man. Junger strips away pretensions, sentimentality and literary artifice; he soberly constructs an environment where the smallness of man and the arbitrariness of the ocean – a place where 70-foot waves roam "like surly giants" (pg. 138) – are the only possible conclusions. When the Andrea Gail goes down, there is no music playing, no nobility on display; only desperation and futile human struggle. This is one great advantage the book has over its movie adaptation of the same name. Not only does the movie have the music playing, but it feels obliged to add some counterfeit drama to the story: George Clooney's character is portrayed as having deliberately headed into the storm when he could have escaped it. Hollywood abhors a narrative vacuum; if those men had to die on screen there had to be a token moral lesson behind it, and the token they reached for was hubris, and perhaps greed.

Junger, in contrast – and to his great credit – has no qualms about facing the reality of the true story. The circumstances he has laid out show us clearly that the Andrea Gail had no time or ability to escape; not only were storms an occupational hazard for seasoned fishermen, but the boat steps into the Perfect Storm "the way one might step into a room" (pg. 105). Such turns of phrase are not infrequent in the book, and Junger's deployment of them does much to keep the reader anchored during the wild unfathomability of the events described. Nowhere is the depth and reality of the tragedy more apparent than in the sequence of pages where, with the Andrea Gail going down with all hands, Junger dissects, at torturous length, the sensations and the medical immediacy of drowning (pp140-6). Strange as it might sound, I mean the word 'torturous' positively; Junger's unavoidable forensic reality mimics the helplessness and the banal tragedy of these men in that moment. It's so potent it's unbearable.

And yet, strangely, it's not voyeuristic; Junger recognises a wound is healed by being touched with care, not by being ignored. The deaths are appalling – and they were real men – but it would be disrespectful if the story was told using euphemisms and polite evasions. This is great, mature writing, and throughout The Perfect Storm Junger achieves a balancing act of respect towards the dead, respect towards the sea, and respect towards what the reader can take in (emotionally and meteorologically). I mentioned at the start of my review that stories of the sea have long been fertile ground for our imagination, and the story of The Perfect Storm would have been arresting even if told by a second-rate writer. That Junger is able to add writing of real calibre to the piece makes it truly special. show less

In my own world, this book was unread, the movie based on it was unseen. But not so in my mother's world - and then she must get to Gloucester. We arranged flights, met at the airport, rented a car and drove to Gloucester, Massachusetts. We spent a lot of time at the Fishermen's Memorial, which made vivid the epigraph in this book: It's no fish ye're buying, it's men's lives. - Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, Chapter 11. We drank cokes at the Crow's Nest, walked around the piers and the museum, and contemplated such a life as lived by Fishermen. It was a very moving experience; I determined to read the book.

The Perfect Storm covers the hundred-year storm of October 1991 and centers its story on the sword boat fleet that was caught in show more it. Sword boats are called long-liners because their main line is up to 40 miles long. The author's descriptions of life on a sword boat will cause you to suddenly appreciate whatever job you have. Mr. Junger has created a harrowing sense of place on the seas during a monster storm, and in his setting of Gloucester.

A real-life nightmare well-written. 3.8 stars show less

It's the last days of October 1991. Most of the Gloucester swordfishing fleet is on the fishing grounds and will be there for another week or so. The Andrea Gail, however is headed home. She's off her usual cycle and with a broken ice-machine and a hold full of fish, her men are ready to go home. With the rest of the fleet out, their boat and their fish will be alone in the harbor, promising a good payday for the 6 men aboard. At 6:00 PM on October 28th, she is hailed by the Mary T, to the southeast. This is the last anyone will hear from the six mean aboard; Captain Billy Tyne, David "Sully" Sullivan, Bobby Shatford, Michael "Bugsy" Moran, Dale "Murph" Murphy, and Alfred Pierre.

If you think you know what this book is about, you're show more probably wrong. Junger of course reconstructs to the best of his, or anyone else's ability, what happened to the Andrea Gail as she tried to ride out the "Storm of the Century," which at one point was so large it's eye stretched from Newfoundland in the north to Jamaica in the south. What I learned about history, meteorology, and the fishing industry, amongst more, could have filled more than this one slim volume. That Junger does all of this in such an accessible way is a testament to his skill with the written word. In addition to the disappearance of the Andrea Gail, he also includes the stories of several other daring rescues, sometimes of the rescuers themselves, that became necessary as this storm terrorized the seaboard and oceans off the northeast coast of North America. Not only did he provide a surprising amount of information in this 236 page book, but he did it in such an accessible manner that I didn't want to put the book down. I needed to know what happened to the Andrea Gail, the Japanese Eishin Maru #78, the Satori, and the Air National Guard para-rescue jumpers who had to ditch their plane when the were unable to refuel mid-air. Junger kept me hooked to the very last page in a way that even a great thriller usually fails to do.

I picked this book up when my curiosity was piqued by the 2000 film of the same name. I was told not to expect the book to be anything like the movie, and it wasn't. It couldn't be though. The novel must stick the facts while the movie had more license to create a fictional account of what happened on board the vessel before it vanished. Both the truth and the fiction, however, have their place and I highly recommend reading and watching them together. show less

Why have I not already read this? I'm a weather geek, and this is a well-written, well-researched book about a monstrous weather event.

Junger includes LOTS of details, so much that I skimmed over some, but fishermen and people who just love technical details will appreciate that. He also includes the personal emotional side from the families of people lost in the storm, for those of us who like to know the human side of events.

I hadn't known what the life of a commercial fisherman was like, and that was ultimately the biggest thing I took away from the book. Fishing towns, fishing crews, loved ones of maritime workers are all illuminated by this book.

The perfect book. If your idea of it was formed by the (imo) not very good film adapted from it, well, don't judge it from that. I found this book riveting, and absolutely nothing created by special effects technicians can match the awe-inspiring description of rogue waves. And just about nothing, no scene even from a Stephen King book, can match the frightening, evocative description of what it's like to drown. When I passed on this book to my mother, that passage would give her nightmares.

Two things in particular amazed me about this book. Like "Into Thin Air" about Everest, it transported me into an alien environment like few other books. And this is based on a true story and reads like a novel, yet as far as I can recall--Junger show more didn't cheat. I mean this is primarily focused on a ship lost at sea with all hands--the Andrea Gail. But Junger doesn't say dramatize their drowning or describe a freak rogue wave using his imagination--instead he relates the experiences of survivors of rogue waves or people who almost drowned--and does so in such a seamless way you feel he's told a story truly--one for which there were no living witnesses. show less

The Perfect Storm is a nonfiction, factual account, written by Sebastin Junger, recreating the last days of the swordfishing boat, Andera Gail caught in the heart of the ocean during "the storm of the century" that hit North American eastern seaboard, in October 1991.

This movie was my first PG-13 movie I ever saw in theaters… don't ask me why I know this, but it's a weird, rare memory I've always remembered. I've seen the movie a few times since then and it's always kind of stuck with me. I kind of knew there was a book about it, but I'm super weird with nonfiction stuff so I stayed away from it. Until, that is, my boss told me he really thought I would enjoy it. So, because this year I wanted to be more open with my reading, I gave show more it a shot. And oh boy, did I get sucked in!

Did I ever want to know as much about fishing as I learned while reading this book? Never in a million years. Junger does it in a way though that, yes you're learning a ton about fishing and boats and weather patterns and rescue swimmers, but it's so you can fully understand what was happening and what could have happened on the Andrea Gail. It's been a few days since I finished this and I still have extremely vivid imagery of specific scenes, especially Junger going into detail of what happens when a person drowns... it stays with you.

This book won't be for everyone, but if you've heard about The Perfect Storm and seen the movie, I highly suggest reading the book. It gives you such a deeper insight as to what may have happened with the men on the Andrea Gail. show less

This excellent book tells the tale of a marine disaster in the Atlantic. It was gripping, intense, and informative. It is certainly one of the finest adventure stories I've ever read.

A perfect storm is a meteorological term meaning (according to Wikipedia) a unusually severe storm that comes about because of a rare combination of meteorological phenomena. It is a disaster if you are far out at sea, and it caused the end of a fishing boat and its crew in the fall of 1991. The Andrea Gail, a fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts was longline fishing for swordfish 575 miles offshore.

It's a harrowing tale. It also taught me a lot of things, including the fact that the fish that lands on our table at home or at the Red Lobster has show more been caught by men and women in the face of danger, far from home, and subject to accidents in a manner few jobs have. Captaining a commercial fishing boat requires so much knowledge, about navigation, weather, equipment, managing people. knowing how and when to call for help, and how to respect the sea that you're floating on. Never before have I read a book that stated so clearly how much can go wrong on an ocean-going vessel.

The book also made me look at extraordinary people who risk their lives daily to help others. The Coast Guard swimmers, people whom you drop from a helicopter to help open-sea rescues were the individuals who impressed me most. To volunteer to go into icy water, to rescue people who aren't even conscious, and to get them to safety is a job for which I have the utmost respect.

A Perfect Storm also looked closely at the families of the fishermen. This part broke my heart. I had to read about wives, girlfriends, parents and children of men who were never going to come home. This was hard reading for me.

A particular rescue off the coast of Nova Scotia's Sable island was particularly intense, and I had to ignore my body's cries for sleep in order to read to the end of the chapter.

This book gets five gold stars and a permanent place on my bookshelves. show less