Rating: 
Summary: Great book, not so great movie
Review: The movie does this book no justice. Read this book, it is a true story of the brave fishermen who risk their lives to put fish on our plates. Overall, I really enjoyed it.
Rating: 
Summary: Boats, Hooks, Fish, Men and a Storm
Review: I spent yesterday reading roughly the last thirty reviews and thinking about them. For a while I thought the time was wasted, but wasted it was not. I did learn something and the process helped me firm up my own opinions. I learned that those reviewers loved the book, or (in my view) they did not understand it. I can't comment on the reviews that compared the book to the flick. I haven't seen it. Those who understood the book as I understood it said things like: "nicely crafted", "amazing job", " . . . in terms that anyone can easily understand", "packs a powerful punch" and "The 'Perfect Storm' is about a Storm"; while those with whom I disagree used phrases like "poorly edited", "less polished than . . ." and "not a novel nor is it novel". What "The Perfect Storm" is not is not relevant. Junger uses all the techniques at a journalist's disposal and many of those usually reserved for novelists-flashbacks, quick cuts, quotation marks, CAPS, fractured tenses, t-shirts stained with fish blood, the stench of the sea, the moan wind in the stays, a mother's tears, a brother's anger, quotations from government documents, newspapers, the Bible, Scott, Johnson, Conrad, Melville and more. What "The Perfect Storm" is, is journalism-not undergraduate journalism-the kind of journalism that uses boats, fishing and fishermen, fishermen's families, fishermen's ambitions, fishermen's frustrations, pride, lives, deaths . . .. Uses them? To what end? To describe a storm. Fortified with that, meteorologists will better understand storms in human terms and the rest of us will better understand storms in technical and emotional terms. I, for one, will never again be able to turn off the television while the meteorologist talks about something in the North Atlantic. And as one of my favorite people says: "I will never order fish again without thinking about boats and hooks and fishermen and 'The Perfect Storm'."
Rating:
Summary: Blunt, honest, not elegant......
Review: This book was fascinating because of the details of the super storm, and how the three weather events collided to form the perfect storm. The writing was very different, the style was basic. This is not a criticism. I think that the style reflects the lives of the fisherman, blunt, honest and not elegant, but very real. To put this story together in this manner from the actual documented facts was a difficult task at best, but this book does it well. The lives of the people involved are a bit abrupt at times, again a reflection of the people involved. It gives a feel for their mindset, and then goes on to detail what it was like for all of them as this storm gathered around them, and showed them natures fury. I am always fascinated by weather, especially on the ocean, and after going through several hurricanes, one a category three, my respect for nature increases as does my desire to know more. This was a good book. I see that many reviewers did not like the style of writing and felt there was a lack of editing, but I felt the style commented on the peoples life-at-sea story. This book is well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: a little disappointing
Review: This is a great story line not done as well as it could have been. Slow to develop but the background was useful enough....it just didn't evolve like I hoped it would or should for such an event. As a reference, try "Fatal Storm" about the 1998 Sydney-Hobart race. It's a fantastic read about another "perfect storm". Very humbling.
Rating:
Summary: WhO EDitid 'Dis Book?
Review: Good book but confused by an unbelievably sloppy execution. Did a deaf, dumb and blind man edit this book? Even the publisher couldn't resist several typos and repeated sentences along with Junger's bouncy tense and baffling redundancy. Get that man an editor!
Rating:
Summary: A nicely crafted novel
Review: I read "The Perfect Storm" not too long after seeing the movie, which prooved as a change for me. I'm glad I saw the movie first, though, because it helped me understand things in the book better. But the two, the movie and the book, were different. The movie was this HollyWood drama while the book was a non-ficticious documentary. I'm not at all saying the book was bad, just saying that there is certainly a difference between the two. In fact, the novel was very interesting with all of the information as well as the dramatic parts occuring with the families and the crew of the Andrea Gail. What I especially liked about this peice is the way it was laid out - how the format was nicely planned. It was a fast-read that really got me into the charachters, and I liked that. The only real trouble that I had with the book was that some things were harder to understand, mostly because I am not at all an expert on sword fishing or ships. However, I still thoroughly enjoyed the book.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but overrated
Review: The Perfect storm is an interesting story, but I found the writing to be less polished than I expected. The story seemed to wander and be padded in places with extra information that wasn't crucial to the story line. Also, I have to wonder about the accuracy since this is a second hand account. For a true life drama with action and adventure, drama and suspense, I recommend The Gulf Between Us: Love and Terror in Desert Storm, by the Acrees. An absolutely riveting story, great book.
Rating:
Summary: Junger could have benefitted from a few hours with Philbrick
Review: Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (Norton, 1997)
availability: still on the bestseller lists, and probably will be until the year 2010 Lots of buzz around this book. Lots of buzz around this movie. Oddly, I don't remember there being lots of buzz around this storm itself. While Junger begins and ends with the Andrea Gail (and his last chapter lends its sinking an almost supernatural air a la the supposed curse surrounding Rebel Without a Cause), there is far more to this book than the story of six guys and a boat. Of course, what more there is is about more people and more conveyances; the storm took the wind out of a number of other boats, a couple of helicopters, etc. While Junger and [Nathaniel] Philbrick [, author of In the Heart of the Sea: The Voyage of the Whaleship Essex] have much the same approach in their styles, Philbrick handles In the Heart of the Sea better than Junger handles The Perfect Storm; perhaps it's because, since there were survivors from the Essex, we have enough of a picture of what happened for Philbrick to give us insight into what the men in those jury-rigged schooners were thinking and feeling during their whole nightmarish trip, while the Andrea Gail, by necessity, has left us guessing. Still, there are enough survivors form the other ships affected by the storm that it's demonstrable Junger is not handling his characters as well, and the book suffers for it. Still, it's hard not to be captivated by a story of man against unpredictable nature, and The Perfect Storm keeps the reader's attention from first page to last, and the immediacy of an event that took place within one's lifetime is more impressive that something that happened before the birth of one's great-grandfather. It is less an indictment of Junger than it is testament to the prowess of Philbrick that, when comparing the two, In the Heart of the Sea comes out on top. The Perfect Storm is in no way a bad book; it just doesn't shine the way it could have. ** 1/2
Rating:
Summary: A rough read for lowly landlubbers
Review: Get out your life jacket, because you're going to need it to wade through the first half of "this true story of men against the sea." Sebastian Junger makes the assumption that the reader has a PhD in maritime science when he hits us with a tidal wave of a passage like: "Tyne then goes over to the chart drawer and pulls out a ten-dollar nautical chart called INT 109. He lines up a course of 250 degrees to his waypoint in the Tail and then walks his way down the map with a set of hinged parallel rules. He rechecks the bearing at the compass rose at the bottom and then adjusts by 20 degrees for the local magnetic variation. That should bring him to his waypoint on the Tail in about three days." Huh???? I'm not sure that Jacques Cousteau can interpret that baby. Thankfully, the last half of the book is coherent enough for a lowly landlubber like myself. There's genuine dramatic tension in the Coast Guard rescue scenes. His depiction of what likely happened on the doomed Andrea Gail is well researched and thought out, and he clearly points out that the tragic scenario is a theory, not a fact. It's handled very well. But the bottom line is that this book has the perfect title. It has the perfect subject matter. But the writing is anything but perfect.
Rating:
Summary: It was okay.
Review: Review of the book "The Perfect Storm," by The Sebastian Junger. This book is a bit of a disappointment. I wished to read the book before seeing the movie since I prefer the written word to the visual arts. Judging by the cover and inside flaps of the book, one would expect a better book: there are many endorsements on the cover from businesses like "Washington Post Book World" and "Newsweek" singing praise to the book. But then, the praises have so many ellipses that for all I know, the reviewers disliked the book but that dislike has been "ellipsed" out by the publisher: such sinister things have happened before. All in all, it isn't a bad book; but it isn't a good one either. In my opinion, The Sebastian Junger should have done a much better job. Why do I call him "The Sebastian Junger?" Because I'm mimicking one of the book's many flaws: he prefixes the names of motor and sailing vessels with the word "The." Such as "The Andrea Gail" and "The Tamaroa." It's not just superfluous to add the "The:" it's also an insult to the vessels. While one may correctly say "The starship Enterprise," saying "The Enterprise" is demeaning to the vessel. The book itself is divided roughly into to parts: useless and boring "background," where The Sebastian Junger lets his readers get aquatinted with the people involved, and the more interesting and exciting second half: the storm itself. It is very often the case that an author's novel will have a poor start and an excellent finish: this is because many authors improve their skills as they are writing. It is then the editor's job to show where the writer has gone wrong, and to have the first part beefed up. This obviously did not occur with The Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm." The Sebastian Junger's worse crime, however, is his continuously switching from past tense to present tense and back again, ignoring all rules of grammar in the process. When The Sebastian Junger describes an event that happened in the past, he nonetheless more often than not uses the present tense. Take for an example the sentence "Billy finishes up his last haul around noon on the 25th and --- the crew still stowing their gear --- turns his boat for home." The tense is all wrong, as it is present tense and it does not fit the context. It should read "Billy finished his last haul around noon on the 25th and --- while the crew were still stowing their gear --- turned his boat for home." The book has countless such problems with tense: the reader could sue for literary whiplash. It is the author's job to perform most of the work for the reader: the reader is not supposed to have to rework the sentences until they make sense. It is possible The Sebastian Junger screwed up the tenses on purpose: to be arty--- an belles-lettres style affectation that he believed, falsely, would distinguish him from the herd. However, the ploy ends up merely being annoying and more than a little irritating. If one can ignore these problems with the book, one will enjoy it. The second half is lots of fun, and even educational.
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