Cultured Travel Guide Books - The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst |
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List Price: $15.95
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 797
EAN: 9780071414296
ISBN: 0071414290
Label: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
Manufacturer: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2003-04-30
Publisher: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
Studio: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating:  
Summary: Extraordinary story with one complaint...
Comment: I've read the reviews of "Strange Last Voyage," and while I concur with many of the thoughtful, accurate reviews, I can only give the book four stars. My beef? The persistently unsympathetic tone in the book.
Crowhurst's fate was a tragic one and deserving of sympathy. While it was the culmination of many poor decisions (an understatement, indeed!), that he ended up in a position of such desperation merits at least a bit more compassion than the authors are willing to grant. I understand their disdain for the foolhardiness of many of Crowhurst's choices--as well as his choice of a solution for "winning the race"--I found that the portrayal was a nearly sniggering, dismissive evaluation of the man. Fellow race competitor Robin Knox-Johnson's sensitive entreaty that Crowhurst not be judged too harshly in the afterword appears to have been ignored by Crowhurst's biographers.
As for the story itself, the recounting of it is perfectly paced. Their work unwickering his confusing logs is convincing, and the investigation of his final days is masterfully recounted.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!
Comment: This is a wonderful book about a truly remarkable, moving and literally tragic misadventure. I first stumbled across Donald Crowhurst's story through a terrific Channel 4 feature film, Deep Water, and was so captivated by it that I bought this and another account of the race (fellow competitor Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way (which, for the record, doesn't really touch on the Crowhurst story)).
The Bard himself could not have scripted a tragedy better than this. Crowhurst, a mercurial but fundamentally unremarkable director of a struggling electronics business, hits upon a means of saving his business and assuring his family's future: entering (and winning) the 1968 Sunday Times single-handed non-stop round-the-world yacht race.
Yes; quite.
Not only, he rationalises, will his entry publicise his firm's own brand of navigational equipment, but the £5000 prize will satisfy an ever more anxious major creditor. His plan to win, cobbled together from a standing start in six months, is to use an (at the time) almost unheard-of design: the trimaran, substantially of his own specification.
No matter that, a weekend yachtsman, Crowhurst has never been out of the Solent and has no realistic chance of beating the hoary old sea-dogs, renowned explorers and ex-navy officers already signed up for the race. No matter that preparing the boat involves raising further finance from the same major creditor who was already breathing down Crowhurst's neck (you do have to wonder what *he* was thinking, don't you). No matter that there is no time to have the boat properly finished, let alone thoroughly ocean-trialled.
And thereafter a perfect, inevitable, tragedy unfolds. Crowhurst is carried by events, some of his own making, to prosecute a plan it is plain, even to him, is madness. But events and circumstances spur him on. A BBC film crew is following him. A rather over-excited publicist inflates expectations. Before he knows it, Crowhurst is off the coast of Portugal in a slow, leaking, malfunctioning, poorly provisioned boat, fearing for his life if he should go on, and for his solvency and marriage should he not. He realises there his no hope of success, but is compellingly obliged to soldier on, stiff upper lip, and makes the hasty and fatal decision to exaggerate his progress. From that point on, fortune's wheel is set.
The ironies and twists of fate which thereafter play out and force events to their sorry conclusion are so cruel that one can hardly blame Crowhurst for reneging on a lifetime's atheism and laying his plight at the hands of a malicious (and game-playing) God. The saddest irony of all was the last: Crowhurst, never intending to do anything but come in a respectable but uninteresting last, announces (to add some drama!), that he is closing on the last remaining competitor who, in panic, redoubles his efforts to coax his own damaged, worn out and jury-rigged boat faster, causing it to break up entirely and sink - leaving Crowhurst to win (if he arrives home at all) by default - the one thing he simply cannot afford to do.
Tomalin and Hall's book, which came out within a year of the original event, is an expertly pieced-together and beautifully written forensic study of the whole awful saga, and charts sympathetically and extensively Crowhurst's descent into what they assume (plausibly enough to me) to have been a form of paranoid schizophrenia by the end of his life. The relation of Crowhurst's final plunge into the abyss, and his final burst of energy in recording his cosmic revelation is by turns dreadful and somehow uplifting: here is a hero going out in true Nietzschean style with the psychology of the tragic poet: "Not so as to get rid of pity and terror ... but beyond pity and terror, to realise in oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses the joy in destruction"
Olly Buxton
Customer Rating:
Summary: A powerful, moving must-read
Comment: This is a must-read classic for any armchair sailor or adventurer. It tells the story of one of nine entrants in the first around-the-world sailing race, Donald Crowhurst, who perpetuated one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century before mysteriouly disappearing. Jonathan Raban, Fellow of the Royal Social of Literature (among his many accolades)writes in the introduction, "I've been reading the Strange Last Voyage every year for more than twenty years, and with each further reading, the Crowhurst story deepends and darkens, gaining in power as the world it records slides further into the past." Written by two journalists just a couple of years after the 1968 events, it is meticulously researched and brilliantly written. The result is a singulary moving, amazing, and haunting story. It transcends genre to become a genuine human tragedy. I envy those reading it for the first time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great
Comment: The other reviews said it all. Great book. I like the true-life adventure genre, and this one is near the top of the list. Crowhurst really lost it at the end. Wow.
If you liked this book, you might try Adrift, by Steve Calahan.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The psychology of Round the world races
Comment: I was led to this book through "A Voyage for Madmen". This book looks at the same Golden Globe race but focuses practically solely on Donald's trip. It gives you actual pages from his log and takes you all the way up to his last minutes. This book kept me really interested. It shows you Donalds trip from sanity to insanity and all in bewteen. It goes in depth on how he faked his progress and what he actually did. If you like sailing or psychology or you want to read some of the philosophy of a man on the brink on insanity, this is a great read. It kept me up all night and it has changed the way I think of solo circumnavigations.
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| Editorial Reviews: |
The Sailor's Classics library introduces a new generation of readers to the best books ever written about small boats under sail In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set sail from England to participate in the first single-handed nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, his boat was found in the mid-Atlantic, intact but with no one on board. In this gripping reconstruction, journalists Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall tell the story of Crowhurst's ill-fated voyage.
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