A fact-filled, exciting tale of a ship’s tragic final voyage. A good complement to Slade’s more well-rounded book.
Tense recounting of the final hours aboard a cargo ship that went down in a hurricane with all hands onboard.
At the end of September 2015, the captain and crew boarded El Faro, a ship loaded with metal containers, on a routine run from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico. At the same time, a hurricane was building in the Atlantic, but Capt. Mike Davidson felt they could outrun the storm and reach the island without too much trouble. Using interviews with family members and thousands of pages of documentation, including the transcriptions of hours of recordings from the voyage data recorder, Foy (Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human, 2016, etc.), a former officer on coastal freighters, pieces together the final few days aboard El Faro, including its fateful run-in with freakish Hurricane Joaquin on Oct. 1, 2015. The author carefully introduces the captain and crew, painting fully fleshed portraits, and he also provides a solid overview of the ship itself. Foy describes the numerous errors that occurred on the last voyage. “The quantum chain reactions that would end in shipwreck began individually and at varied locations, at different hours, sometimes on separate days,” he writes, “but they started to come together most concretely in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 29, 2015, as the SS El Faro prepared for sea.” These mistakes, including hubris, the relentless chase for profits, and breaches in safety, claimed the lives of all onboard. The author provides little information about what happened after the ship sank, how it was found, and who was found responsible—details that receive greater elaboration in Rachel Slade’s compelling book on the same subject, Into the Raging Sea. Foy maintains the focus on the hours leading up to the last minute that anyone was alive, and photographs, maps, and drawings help readers imagine the entire scenario.
A fact-filled, exciting tale of a ship’s tragic final voyage. A good complement to Slade’s more well-rounded book.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8489-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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