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Old 09-28-2010, 10:26 AM   #6473
MacEachaidh
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Join Date: Apr 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by poohbear_nc View Post
Now reading "The Perfect Storm" - Sebastian Junger - it's a bit of a mish-mash -- given he tries to imagine what happened on a boat that went down at sea with no survivors, and no radio contact. I get really bothered when authors writing non-fiction refer to people by their first names (a pet peeve of mine), but Junger persists in speculating what "Billy" was doing while the boat was sinking. Just jars on my sensibilities.
The rest of the book is padded with brief historical notes and really unnecessary and overly fanciful descriptions of the people involved in the rescues (I felt he was already casting the movie version)
I got a lot out of reading that book, poohbear -- more than sheer terror of the open ocean, anyway. (Plus a lingering fascination+dread of the concept of "rogue waves"!)

I had a different perception from yours of Junger's writing. It was my sense that he dealt with the whole thing very sensitively, and made it fairly clear he wasn't making up a narrative out of thin air; his character sketches of the men lost in the storm were drawn from the real people's families and friends, and he was at pains to point out that we don't know the specifics of what happened to them, but gave examples of the kinds of things that can happen in these situations drawn, again, from real-life experiences.

The movie got a bit ridiculous, but I thought the book did a good job of being factual, impartial and respectful.
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