Winter Book Reviews from Kingfisher Bookstore

Kingfisher Bookstore Staff Picks: DISASTERS AT SEA

Coupeville, Washington's Kingfisher Bookstore staff recommend their favorite winter reads, this time with a nautical theme! 

Brad’s Pick

“The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

By John U. Bacon (Liveright)

Released in time for the 50th anniversary of one of the most famous 20th century maritime tragedies, and not just because of the song, this book combines an intimate portrait of the lives changed and lost through the headline-grabbing disaster with a detailed history of Great Lakes shipping and the economies it drove.

“This is a story that’s been hard to tell because of the ‘why,’” said Brad, who came to bookselling after retiring from a 40-year career as a merchant sailor. “It’s an emotional story about hubris and ego and competition. They were pushing the limits, kept trying to break more records. McSorely, the captain, was retiring at the end of the season. Did he decide to keep going because he wasn’t going to end his career as one of the most skilled great lake skippers of all time chickening out, hiding behind an island?”

“There’s a lot of detail about some of the crew members and their lives and hopes and families. Their radar was out, they were dead reckoning, only fifteen miles from safe water when they went down. Having worked on the Great Lakes on ships carrying taconite and frozen coal, it was emotional for me to imagine being in their shoes.”

Meg’s Pick

“Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific”

By Coll Thrush (University of Washington Press)

The waters off the Pacific coast of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia are treacherous, and it seems every community has a shipwreck story. From the Columbia River bar to Clayoquot Sound, and from Spanish galleons in the 1600s to the recent past, the book tells the stories of some of the over 2,000 shipwrecks that dot our Pacific coast.

“Thrush looks at the stories of shipwrecks along the coast with a self-described ‘view from the shore,’ looking at the afterlives of the wrecks themselves and what they meant to indigenous and settler communities,” Meg said. “This isn’t a traditional collection of stories of doomed vessels and sending the women to the lifeboats. It is human and uses innovative storytelling that shifts the focus from man against the sea to the intersection of Indigenous peoples and the natural world with colonialism.”

Felix’s Pick

“Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck”

Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books)

“Marriage at Sea” is both high seas adventure and a grueling survival story, but it is really a story about love and partnership tested by adversity.

“This is not so much a biography as an extremely readable story based on real events and documents,” said bookseller Felix. “A charming English woman marries a man who is a bit of a misanthrope but does like boats. They sell everything, buy a boat and set off to sail to New Zealand from England, but in the Pacific a whale smacks their boat and they are stuck in a life raft for 117 days with no one but each other. Their relationship quickly flips on its head when they need someone really in charge, at an existential level. They harness sea turtles, keep pet sea turtles and eat sea turtles. They fight a shark, the elements, boredom, discord and terror.”    X