A Masterful Nonfiction "Novel"

Like Truman Capote, to whom he is being more and more often compared, Sebastian Junger has written an engrossing nonfiction "novel" about the lives and deaths — and most everything in between — of New England's professional fishermen. The book is compelling and suspenseful at every turn, and it really feels like a novel, a thriller — if it weren't for the fact that you know it's all true.

A Chilling Addition to a Modern Genre

The Perfect Storm belongs to a genre of historical writing

A Swell Read

I began this book late one night after finishing the last book and immediately was swept in. This is not my typical reading faire but I do love any stories of the sea so it still follows suit. The storytelling isn't anything unique, the plot isn't one that hasn't been explored before, but whatever this writer did - it sucked me straight in, tearing apart the book in a little over a day. The story is about 6 fisherman abord the Andrea Gail during the Halloween Gail of 1991. No one survived and no distress calls were ever heard from the ship, making it very hard to come up with the last minutes aboard the ship but the writer does a fairly good job at that and you can almost put yourself on the deck with those men, feeling the rise and fall of the swells and the sheer terror they must have felt seeing 100 + foot waves about to break on the bow. The only criticism is that I feel that the author could have wrote a bit more chronologically (he does bounce a bit) and done more of a back story on the fisherman than just on Bobby. I think it would have filled out the story just enough but the book was quite well without it.