Customer Reviews

After the Storm : True Stories of Disaster and Recovery at Sea

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Be forewarned if you purchase "After the Storm" expecting it to be another in the recent spate of books recounting tales of nautical disasters. It does focus on ten seperate instances of seaborne mayhem dating from the 1820s to the 1990s. But instead of including straightforward narrative accounts, author John Rousmaniere is more concerned with the literary and spiritual aspects of such events. The common thread that runs through these tales is that for the most part they all either affected or were commented upon by notable literary personalites, from Mary Shelley to Robert Louis Stevenson to Joseph Conrad and others. So much so that the accounts of the disasters themselves take a back seat to describing their social, psychological, religious and even political effects.

All in all there is nothing necessarily wrong with Rousmaniere's approach, except that its appeal will be limited to the interest that the reader has in the exteraneous subject matter. Unfortunately, the book's subtitle, "True Stories of Disaster and Recovery at Sea," leads one to believe that it is a collection of adventure tales, which is really not the case.

Overall, I would recommend that potential readers closely scrutinize the summaries of this book's subject matter to determine if it will appeal to them.

I enjoy reading sea stories such as "Working on the Edge", but it was a real chore to get through the maze of details which seemed to be included just to make the book 'thick' and did nothing to really add to the 'story'. Pass on this one and spend your money on something written as less of a text book.

John Rousmaniere relates the historical facts that surrounded each disaster and arranges the stories in historical sequence. This background information adds depth to the stories of sailing disasters by relating them to one another. We learn how sailing and attitudes toward sailing influenced the events of each disaster and we get a better understanding of the sailors involved.

This is a book full of informative, detailed and engaging stories about disasters and storms at sea. Rousmaniere wrote this book some years after he experienced and wrote about, the tragic 1979 Fastnet yacht race disaster (Fastnet, Force 10). He dissects each from the perspective of a yacht racer, seafarer, philosopher and theologian. He details the causes and factors leading up to the events and the aftereffects in communities and the world. In so doing, he lets out his own heart and soul. If you are interested in just the stories, you'll have to skip portions of the text. If you want to know "the rest of the story", then this book is for you. It is a book that I take off the shelf and revisit when the figurative storms of my life need to be put back into perspective.

The author goes beyond the simple description of a sea disaster and approaches the subject much as an NTSB accident investigator would look at the reason behind the accident.