I liked this book alot and have it. If you have a chance to buy it, used or not, get it because it is a great book.

I purchased this book on a hunch, and was glad I did. My kids adored the stories in this book, and it was brought out often for their nightly read. My son especially enjoyed The Lorax. A classic collection by one of the best children's authors ever, I highly recommend it.

it has no intresting in it and it needs to get rid of that nasty green eggs and ham.

In this spectacular book, Sebastian Junger vividly portrays what it is like for a sword-fishing boat and its crew attempting to ride out an horrendous storm. The book is a bit slow getting started- after reading the first couple of chapters one wonders whether the Andrea Gale will ever leave port.

Eventually, however, he tells of the crew's journey to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and sets the scene for their encounter with a rare confluence of meteorologic conditions feared by every mariner (and probably by every human being with a pulse)- gale force winds and waves approaching 80-100 feet. His account of the storm and the adventure of life on the crew of a swordfish boat are interesting and enthralling.

Some of the main weaknesses of the book include: lack of significant character development; emphasis on a great deal of interesting but often extraneous technical data, speculation and secondhand accounts that sometimes conflict with one another. These detours occasionally serve to derail the power of the story, if only temporarily.

On the whole it is a really cool book that is well worth reading. Morals of the story: 1) pay attention to storm warnings 2) be sure to have your survival suit and know where the life raft is located before you leave port. Enjoy the ride- if you can get beyond the natural human fear of the mighty ocean!

Anyone who has spent even minimal time on the water should not miss reading this riveting account of the "real" storm of the century. Having run a commercial offshore fishing vessel for eight years, I was at first intrigued by a brief interview with the author on C-SPAN. I immediately obtained a copy and began reading out of curiosity, but with a bit of skepticism. I admit to being overly critical of so-called experts who claim to be knowledgeable on subjects with which I've had personal experience. But in this case, Junger impressed me as someone who had done his research very well. I gained new insight into the subject from his detailed descriptions of weather, sea conditions, and the physics of marine architecture.

Don't get turned off by the seemingly boring subjects just mentioned. The author combines the mechanics of such phenomena with the human drama unfolding in the lives of Capt. Billy Tyne and five crew members of the Andrea Gail. From the dockside bars of Gloucester, MA to the Flemish Cap on the Grand Banks, you are thrust into the typical routine of a swordfish longline fisherman. The ultimate high rollers of commercial fleets, these men make the week-long trip to the fishing grounds and work with little sleep under tough conditions for the next two weeks. Every decision made can mean the difference between a big paycheck or giving up a month of your life for little or nothing if you have a "broker."

From the captain's perspective, all of the risks and trade-offs are constantly evaluated and change almost hourly. No computer program could come close to processing all of this information in a way that the experienced blue water fisherman is forced to. In the case of the Andrea Gail, she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Junger puts the reader inside the mind of the boat captain, revealing how the forces of nature, economics, and human behavior combine to turn this October voyage into a tragic disaster.

I could not put this book down until I finished it. You have to keep reminding yourself that you're reading non-fiction, and to those not familiar with commercial fishing it will certainly open a whole new world of understanding and amazement about a vanishing way of life.

This is an exceptional piece of non-fiction that I couldn't put down. The book works on several levels--the multi-faceted story is compelling and the science behind the weather and events that unfold, fascinating. Junger keeps coming with page after page of interesting perspectives and keen observations. For example, when describing the logistical difficulty in jumping from a helicopter into a storm tossed ocean. (Jump at the wrong moment missing the crest of a wave, and you fall 80 additional feet through the air to its base). The interviews and science behind the events add another layer to the storyline.

One of my "Top 20" favorite books. The writing here is first rate, and the investigative journalism as good as it gets. As must read for folks who enjoy the kind of reporting found weekly in the New Yorker. Another similar tale of equal excitement is "Isaac's Storm," about the hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900 killing 6 to 8,000 people.

Save your money and purchase the REAL stories 'outlined' in this cheap book put together to ride the wave of The Perfect Storm. The collection of stories is nothing more than a collection of extended abstracts of the real stories. Many of the 'abstracts' are taken out of context and the reader does not get an accurate picture of what and why the nautical situation developed or how it concluded. Pass on this one.

This book is in a series put out by Adrenaline books and each book contains certain selections chosen by the editor. The selections are either excerpts from books, excerpts from diaries and journals, short stories, or an occasional essay. I look at how good the writing is, and how good the stories are.

There are 16 selections in this book. Half of them range from good to great, and the other eight are fairly poor. The writing is okay throughout, with some being more exceptional than others, but it's the stories that differ the most in quality. Six of them, whether written well or not, have virtually no story whatsoever or are very poor. As it turns out, the best stories in this book are also some of the better written. This is where the book's strength shows up. The selections introduce you to stories and books you may have never read and after reading some of the good selections, it makes you want to go read the books they were taken from. So I would mostly recommend this book to people who have not read much or any sea stories. It introduces you to a wide variety of sea literature. But otherwise I would only lightly recommend it by saying that everyone would find some selections that they really like.

Clint Willis has created a fascinating series of books with Epic, Climb, High, Wild, Ice, Rough Water, and The War. Each of these volumes presents the best literature about their respective subjects in a powerful cohesive manner. These books are a quick read, but intricate and spellbinding. I have given many of them to friends and family as gifts.

I love this series and I have all the books - so I know. It hurts me to only offer three stars but, simply, this one just isn't as good as the rest. First of all, it's nothing like as advertised above. There are 18 stories, but only 9 of those shown on that cover, which has been redesigned, too - I don't know what happened. Despite the publisher's notes above, there is NOTHING from Bonington, Venables or Davidson - no story of -148 wind chill on Mt. McKinley (the one I anticipated most). We got some wires crossed here someplace. Of the 18 stories you do get, 5 of them are fiction (including the 2 longest )- a greater percentage than any other in the series except "Dark". Of the 13 nonfiction tales, several have very little to do with survival as we've come to know it from earlier books in the series - they really just express wonder at nature. I'm surprised at the inclusion of "The Storm" by Junger - it fits, sure, but it's so well-known by now, and one of the best features of the Adrenaline Series has been how it introduces us to stories and authors we may not know. I do not mean to say that these aren't well-written pieces: the ones by Chaplin, Groom and Gann are riveting. I guess it just depends on what you expect. But don't let this book be your introduction to this awesome series; get High, Epic or Wild Blue instead, and if you've read them already, don't expect as much here.

Sebastian Junger wrote The Perfect Storm, which was one of the best books of the '90s. He's tried to follow that up with Fire, but unfortunately this book falls way short of the previous one, for several reasons.

For one thing, Fire is only partially about an actual fire. What the author has apparently done is taken articles he wrote at various times, and just laid them into this book. The first two articles are about fire-fighting in the early nineties, and most (but not all) of the rest of the articles cover war around the world, mostly in the Balkans. The last two deal with Afghanistan. The articles on firefighting are interesting, but Junger's ablities as a war correspondent are only marginal. There are numerous references to machineguns when he presumably means assault rifles, for instance, and his understanding of what's happening appears to be only so-so. The articles are arranged strictly in chronological order, so that whatever action holds them together (if there are two on the same region) is usually lost. The best of the pieces, to my mind, covers the silly partition of the isle of Cyprus between Turks and Greeks, co-written with another journalist.

I'm sure Junger has another good book in him, maybe more. This isn't it---this isn't a book really, it's just a collection of articles he wrote.

This is not a bad book, but it is not a great book either. Junger wrote well in The Perfect Storm, and followed this with a collection of articles written for magazines. These articles were well written, but they didn't have the pull that The Perfect Storm has.
Junger did most of the investigation into these dangerous jobs after he was hurt in a tree accident. Forest fire fighters were his introduction piece and I was amazed how dangerous this job is. Junger follows with investigations into the conflicts in Afghanistan, the former Jugoslavia, and Cyprus. Then he makes a stab at whale hunting in St. Vincent.
For such a short book, this collection of essays does not hold the imagination of the reader. Yes the articles are interesting and educational, but one can well read another book and get more interest.

Sebastian Junger's fascination with dangerous lines of work and "people confronting situations that could easily destroy them" (Fire, xvii) brought him wide fame and notoriety with the story of the Gloucester swordfishing boat, the Andrea Gail, in magazine articles and then The Perfect Storm, his bestselling first book. However, his desire to find people in these situations (and, in a sense, an attempt to describe his own reasons for being in those situations) is the underlying theme of his new book, a collection of excellent magazine articles and other short works called Fire.

Coincidentally so is the name of the first piece, an essay about forest firefighting in general and the efforts at the Flicker Creek fire, one of many non-descript fires Mr. Junger covered, in 1992. It's a particularly good piece about the hazards of fighting forest fires, the techniques and terminology used, some history, and most of all the various groups of people that do the actual fighting. One of Mr. Junger's first articles (though there is no credit as to where it was published, if anywhere), "Fire" serves as a nice introduction, thematically and stylistically, for the rest of the book.

Another article deals with the fire at Storm King Mountain, which killed twelve firefighters in 1994 and is very similarly themed. Following that is the bulk of the book, a series of articles concerning war and conflict in all its misery; Mr. Junger covers the Kashmir, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Cyprus, and finally, in two very telling pieces, Afghanistan (before and after September 11, 2001). Interspersed are two articles, one dealing with one of the last Caribbean whale hunters (which doesn't sound particularly dangerous these days but remember the story of the ramming and destruction of the whaleship Essex and the novel it inspired, Moby Dick) and John Colter, an early 19th century fur trapper/frontiersmen and the quest for, lacking a better term, adventure.

Mr. Junger engages the reader in an easy yet realistic prose that is absorbable and mesmerizing at the same time. Occasionally, given similar subject matter (the two articles on forest firefighters and Afghanistan, for instance) he unintentionally repeats himself, which can be annoying, but cannot be helped.

However, each of the articles tell their own unique, wrapped story that leaves the reader wanting to more, wanting to know what happened after the writing stopped. Some, like "Escape from Kashmir" end in a lucky escape attempt and mystery, while others, like "The Terror of Sierra Leone" and "Dispatches from a Dead War," end in everlasting misery of unending conflict and hatred.

In the end, Mr. Junger's search for dangerous situations and occupations puts him in the very same situations, acting for the most part as a war correspondent and writer. Sometimes it just makes one wish they'd never encountered it, such as Mr. Junger's vivid description of coming under a Taliban artillery bombardment on an Afghani hilltop: "There was nothing exciting about it, nothing even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad." (Fire, 207)

Yet Mr. Junger returned; in late 2001 he followed the fighters of the Northern Alliance as they attacked and swept through the Taliban, into Kabul. Why? Mr. Junger never says, though the excuse that it was a job was probably valid. However, it could be that he probably would not want to be anywhere else - and that, beyond any other motive, is really the sole truth behind the men and women of Fire.