In places, the book gets unbearably tense: a 72-foot boat fighting hundred-foot waves, the ditching of a rescue helicopter in the ocean, an all too convincing account of what it’s like to drown. Junger even makes high drama out of a Canadian cold front, a storm from the Great Lakes and Hurricane Grace converging to produce that “perfect storm,” as one meteorologist calls it. (Eventually it stretched from Jamaica to Labrador.) As with any true-adventure story, you wonder if you ought to be getting such a bang out of real people’s real suffering. But in “The Perfect Storm,” we’re sharers, not voyeurs. The book is a humanizing reminder that we, too, could–probably will–be called on to bear more than we could possibly imagine.
