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Originally Posted by bfisher
Just starting "Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush" by Geoff Dyer. This is Dyer's latest book. It covers a two week period when Dyer was Writer-in-Residence aboard an aircraft carrier on deployment in the Persian Gulf.
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Dyer mentions making airplane models as a kid, and imagining a Phantom being catapulted off a carrier. I did that too, and I also built carrier models (Enterprise CV-6 and Lexington CV-16), and of course, our first kid had the bigassest GI Joe toy the USS Flagg
, so I was probably going to like this book anyway; he was living a dream for me, living on an aircraft carrier, and being able to see a large part of the life on the ship.
Beyond the bigger toys for bigger boys aspect, the most immediate feel I got for this was that it was like a Paul Theroux travel book, where he's describing what its like to travel in a foreign country at a level deeper than the Hyatt or the Starbucks; you are going to get some sense of what life is like in another culture. Also, unlike Theroux, there is a sense that he likes and respects most of the people he encounters, so that greatly adds to the pleasure. I did come away from the book feeling that I better understood why people would volunteer to serve in the US Navy, and why many of them would choose to make a life's work of it.