At first I found Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea completely unreadable. If you know the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg and if you love that story, you wouldn't like this book. The book is basically a guesstimate of what happens on board the Andrea Gail and what happens around it, but mostly it describes the weather conditions and the way hurricanes are formed.
This is an example of something from the book that really annoys me, because it's such a random description of the events:
"Every hour, perhaps, Billy might get hit by a breaking fifty-footer. That's probably the kind of wave that blew out the windows. And every 100 hours, Billy can expect to run into a non-negotiable wave (...) Billy's undoubtedly working too hard at the helm to give drowning much thought." (Junger 127)This is basically a description of what could be happening on board the ship when the hurricane reaches it. However, the perhapses and the probablies outweigh the story. And what annoys me most is that it says that a wave blew out the windows; this is not a known fact. He is guessing, but at the same time he is perhapsing and probablying all over the place in that same sentence.
I didn't like the book until I reached page 160. When Junger starts describing other events that take place during the same storm. When the people who survive are able to tell the tale afterwards. That is quite interesting and that is something he should have centred his book around. Basing it on an event of a ship that sinks with no radio contact since before the storm, is a waste of what could have been a good story. In this instance I'd say film 1 - book 0.
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