The Last Ship: A Novel [Hardcover]

William Brinkley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 1988

The unimaginable horror of total nuclear war has been let loose upon the world, and only one ship, the Nathan James, with 152 men and 26 women aboard, has survived. Her captain narrates the electryfing story of this crew's voyage through the hell of nuclear winter, their search for survivial, and the fate of mankind when they find an uncontaminated paradise.
"Beautifully written...A magnificent book."
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this apocalyptic novel of the sea is that Brinkley has been able to spin so slender a plot to so great lengthmore than 500 pages. Global nuclear disaster has struck, and the guided-missile destroyer Nathan James, short on food and fuel, its crew of men and women seriously depleted by desertions, sails the seas in search of an uncontaminated landfall. The Nathan James is apparently the only ship afloatuntil it meets a Russian sub and a little belated glasnost is arranged. The destroyer's captain, a man given to Conradesque reflections more often ponderous than illuminating, describes how he struggles to assert his authority and maintain crew morale, how he establishes a settlement on an unpolluted Pacific island, assigning to his female crew the task of ensuring the continuation of the human race (he has a steamy affair with one of them himself) and how he handles, among other problems, a case of multiple murder. Brinkley (Don't Go Near the Water, Quicksand) clearly knows the U.S. Navy, and his narrative has its moments. However, his style here is turgid and the story as a whole, unlike the sleek and deadly Nathan James, sits pretty heavily in the water.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The author of Don't Go Near the Water superbly depicts life on a U.S. Navy destroyer after a heavy nuclear exchange. That women are now integrated into the navy adds to the interest. The survivors hunt a safe haven where life and perhaps the human race can continue, away from radiation. A Russian submarine, apparently friendly, appears and then is gone, while a group of mutineers irrationally try to return "home." The captain's narration is thoughtful and sensitive. Inexperienced with women, he must oversee the desperate assembly-line attempts to conceive children that he himself does not join. More than a military adventure, this is a first-rate study of beauty amid ghastliness, engrossing to the end.William A. Donovan, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 616 pages
• Publisher: Viking; 1st edition (March 18, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670809810
• ISBN-13: 978-0670809813
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (127 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,187,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I liked it despite the writing style, November 6, 2001

By 

Kim Boykin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Last Ship (Paperback)

Brinkley writes in long, convoluted sentences that I often found hard to follow, with incomplete sentences mixed in to confuse things even more. He uses an awful lot of SAT words, and his descriptions use so many adjectives that they reminded me of compositions created with a magnetic poetry kit.

And yet, I found the book engaging. I like post-apocalyptic stories; this one is about a U.S. ship carrying perhaps the last humans alive after a nuclear war. The book gets you inside the life and mind and worldview of a sailor, which I found fascinating. I was drawn into the quandary of how to create a stable society with such a high male/female ratio (though I didn't believe that their solution would work as well as it did). And I did like one of Brinkley's writing quirks (which some readers may find annoying): he can take three pages to narrate a five-second conversation because he includes so much detail about what's going on in the head of the ship's captain, who's the narrator.

For other non-sailors: The word "ways" can be a singular noun meaning "an inclined structure upon which a ship is built or supported in launching." (I couldn't make any sense of the opening sentence until I looked that up.)

Better post-apocalyptic novels: "Earth Abides," "Alas, Babylon," "The Stand," "On the Beach," and "The Road."

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Please use a flippin' PERIOD!, July 20, 2001

By 

Russ (Duluth, GA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Last Ship (Paperback)

A great premise and much thoughful work, but Brinkley goes on and on and on and on and on and on and what was the editor thinking when he proofed this book when he looked at it and read it and then considered what type of modifications should be made and then he didn't notice that most every sentence is hundreds of words long and that they tend to comprise lenghty paragraphs and drove me up the wall trying to struggle past these elephants in the room to attempt to distill any type of story or pacing or plot or mood because the sentences that Brinkley constructs are limitless and if you move your lips while you read you better take a huge breath or you will suffocate before you finally, eventually, make it to that rare and glorious period that Brinkley may or may not decide to put at the end of a rambling thought that somehow, by the laws of literature, finally come to an end and possibly it is some type type of radioactive mutation that has caused all of the periods to wither and die, maybe.(period)

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A hard read, not an 'action-adventure', but worth it, July 12, 1999

By 

Maurice E Dunn - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Ship (Paperback)

I will agree with a previous reviewer that Brinkley has a BAD habit of over-using some rather obscure terms. I will also concede that the book is VERY dry and introspective, and that it really doesn't have a long list of 'hero' figures to support. Lastly, the book is NOT Clancy-esque in its technical descriptions and situations, but it is accurate enough for the average reader. Having admitted these short-comings, however, I think it is also clear that Brinkly knows how to write. The dryness and the introspection of the first half of the book help pull the reader, willingly or not, into the character of the narrator (the ship's captain). This character MUST be dry and introspective... heavy issues weigh on his mind, and the reader will share them before the end of the book. While not a typical suspense novel, it has its share of that emotion as well, and the surprises can be like a stake to the heart for the reader.