This is a very exciting book with a very realistic, and certainly not boring, account of a boat semi-adrift for about a month without water and without food in the South Atlantic Ocean. This is a very true World War II story, with the Doggerbank being a German supply ship (blockade runner) returning from Japan and bound for German-occupied France with its precious cargo, and the ship being sunk mistakenly by a German submarine before it reached its assigned port.

The book is a translation, so you can expect some of that clumsiness that occurs in such instances; however I was impressed how well the story came through in English -- during the early part of the book the reader could almost smell the diesel fumes from the old German ships as well as the sauerkraut that the German chef was famous for cooking down in the ship's galley.

The book is divided into three parts: (1) how the sole survivor of the Doggerbank managed to finagle his way aboard the ship; (2) the second part is very suspenseful as the Doggerbank passes through a school of u-boats; and (3) the third part is the very best account of how people behave and hold up during a shipwreck (and I've read Nordoff and Hall and The Old Man and the Sea )...

Overall the book is easy reading, exciting, and revealing to the reader. It holds the reader's interest to the point the reader wants to finish the entire book in one session. (It took me two...) A five star book by anybody's accounting.