Rating: 
Summary: Rough Lives On Rough Seas
Review: Drinking, fishing...drinking, at sea...drinking, fighting...drinking to forget the next fishing trip. Junger's account is riveting. The reader will, forever after, imagine commercial fishing and the romance of the open sea with etched images of danger, despair, and moments of transcendent human courage. A great adventure.
Rating: 
Summary: Curiously unsatisfying
Review: I'm struggling to explain why I didn't much like this book. I guess several things made it irritating for me.First, the Andrea Gail's crewmen aren't well developed as people--they come across as cardboard or stick figures, which is unfair to them. Same with events. No one knows what happened to the ship, and the book ends up being a sand castle of sensational speculation, much of it unnecessary and some of it, I thought, rather tasteless (especially the gratuitous description of the process of drowning). Second, the writing is laden with superlatives, and after a while, you just get tired of reading how everything is the greatest, the worst, the most powerful, the most sickening, the most awful, etc. As a result, I ended up feeling fatigued, and skimmed the last part of the book. At times it seemed that Junger wanted to give every sentence the rhetorical equivalent of an exclamation mark. I kept comparing "The Perfect Storm" to Farley Mowat's "Grey Seas Under," a book I read 15 or 20 years ago. I don't remember its content well, except that it also described rescues of seafarers off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, but I do recall that Mowat's writing was more understated, and perhaps for that reason far more engaging, than that of "The Perfect Storm." Third, a book like this suffers from the lack of careful copy-editing. This probably isn't Junger's fault: it's the publisher's. The hardback edition has numerous typos or other glitches: St. John's, Nfld., is sometimes misspelled St. Johns (pp. 93, 94), "sunk" is given as the past tense of "sink" (p. 26), and the modern Portuguese word for cod, bacalhau, comes out baccalao (p. 24). There are other goofs, but no point in listing them all here--it would come across as pedantic. It just seems to me that publishers more and more are abandoning their responsibility to edit copy carefully.
Rating: 
Summary: Why this book when you can read Private Parts?
Review: Great Book...I loved every page of it however, I will stick to Private Parts and Miss America by Howard Stern.
Rating: 
Summary: reading again
Review: Had it not been for a plane ride and a book called "The Perfect Storm." I wouldn't have continued to read the books I've now read.
Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: Being from the Gloucester area (Rockport), I have come from afishemans family. At one point, my father was working on the Hannah Boden, and would come home after a month, telling of the experiences. I also had the opportunity to meet Sebastian Junger at a speaking at the Rockport Public Library in Rockport, Massachusetts. I recommend this book to anybody who wants to learn about the most dangerous profession as well as the toughest fishing port in New England. Questions or comments about fishing life or Gloucester?Email me at jenjen@thepipeline.net
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Summary: Required reading for New Englanders
Review: Why did I put off reading this story for so long? I asked myself that question a million times and blamed it on the fact that I live in Scituate, MA, a coastal community that was devastated by the storm known to us New Englanders as the No Name Storm. After reading this book I found the tragedies I suffered on shore, and they were substantial, were nothing compared to the tragedies and horrors that were felt by those onboard the Andrea Gail. This book will put you right in the thick of it and even though I was hesitant to read for fear of dredging up painful memories, I found it gripping and too hard to put down until I finished it 2 days later.
Rating:
Summary: One of the few books I couldn't put down!
Review: The author kept me clued to my seat waiting for the next chain of events to happen. I have passed this book on to family and friends who have had the same reaction. It's funny, regardless of your background or interest, you can appreciate the way this book is written, and emerse yourself in the lives of the characters so well illustrated throughout the story. Read this book - you won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: the greatest tribute to fishermen
Review: this book is outstanding! it tells the story of what must have been a horrible journey into the abyss. i would highly recommend it for anyone who loves non-fiction books. it was captivating. i read it in two nights. it's a classic tale of new england fishermen and the havoc mother nature can wreak upon them.
Rating: 
Summary: A good story, but...
Review: Finding out what happens to the crew forced me to finish this book. Otherwise, the writing is tedious and the real life history of the people onboard is almost nonexistent.
Rating:
Summary: You'll gasp for air, and be grateful that you can...
Review: When I first saw that a journalist wrote this book I was skeptical. But the skepticism dissolved before I had a dozen pages read. This is a remarkable account of what I can only imagine to be the most horrific moments in the lives of those six men. When Sebastian Junger described the technical and emotional process of drowning I found myself gasping for air... and I was thankful that I could.
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