Read Run the Storm A Savage Hurricane a Brave Crew and the Wreck of the SS El Faro George Michelsen Foy 9781501184901 Books

Product details Paperback 288 pages Publisher Scribner; Reprint edition (August 6, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 1501184903

Run the Storm A Savage Hurricane a Brave Crew and the Wreck of the SS El Faro George Michelsen Foy 9781501184901 Books Reviews

• This is a work of integrity, compassion, and old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. I didn't know much about commercial shipping or weather systems when I opened the book; now I not only know more, I care. How does George Michelsen Foy manage to make a container ship's pumps, holds, and consoles (not to mention the physics of how a tropical depression becomes a Category 4 hurricane) so fascinating? Here's how He starts and ends with El Faro's people, the mates and hands and captain who uncomplainingly do their jobs until they can't do them any more.
  
  Some "disaster book" authors tug at the reader's pity or conscience by resorting to inventions and assumptions. Foy doesn't play those tricks. When no one knows exactly what occurred at a particular moment, he reports that no one knows exactly what occurred. When he makes an informed guess, he says "maybe" and "perhaps." He acknowledges the agonizing void at the center of this story—the "why" that won't ever be answered. And still he keeps you racing through his book, because you HAVE to know what happens to El Faro and her people at the end.
• Stories about maritime disasters, airline crashes and similar topics are rarely on my reading list. As a cruising sailor with a lifelong career as an airline pilot I’ve observed that authors and screenwriters rarely get it right in highly specialized and mostly closed fields where much of the reading public has almost no first-hand experience.
  
  But George M.Foy set the hook with his previous title, “Finding North”, a very personal, well researched and thoroughly fascinating treatment of the navigational imperative that affects us all. Especially significant to me are his treatment of GPS and what he calls, “Cybernav”— automated navigation systems—how they affect us and at what cost?
  
  With “Run The Storm” Foy reels me right in. This is anything but your ordinary disaster story. His impressively detailed research uncovers the chain of events that conspired as they usually do, to culminate in the finally unavoidable accident while rarely if ever interjecting the author into the story. He relies on factual data, interviews with credible sources, recorded data, historical weather analysis and an amazing amount of large vessel engineering data, yet the human side shines through in ways that range from ordinary to incredible. And it is, in the end, a story of the human spirit, and human failure on many levels. Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board investigational results give us their probable cause assessments, but Foy’s gradual un-layering of the details puts the reader in the terrifyingly omniscient position of knowing what’s coming and why, but being unable to shout through the pages to the crew, and the National Weather Service, and the shipping company, to Do Something To Break This Chain!
  
  With this work, George M. Foy has also exposed a theme common wherever the conflict between corporate profit and safety clash; the pressure either expressed or implied to serve the bottom line first, the potential for inappropriate compromise and the price to be paid for lack of aggressive independent oversight, all themes that are compelling and common as waves on the sea. A great read by a first class author.
  
  Captain D. Burke Continental Airlines, (Ret)
• I'm a retired U.S. Coast Guard officer and my specialty was marine safety and security. I can say without reservation that I can't see how any author/researcher could improve on Mr. Foy's book. I have read some of the other books on the El Faro's sinking that have taken on a public fascination probably because the incident happened only three years ago. None of the other books can compare. It's not like reading about the loss of a sailing ship on Cape Horn some 169 years ago on her way to the newly discovered California gold fields. Mr. Foy's writing is witness to the fact that he teaches creative writing at New York University. His style, organization, and clarity of writing were joys to this reader. I'm looking forward to Mr. Foy's future works on shipping that I hope he will pen.
• I agree with several of the good and the not so good comments people have made about this book. First off, the book is definitely worth the cost and is a good read. Even though I had read through the final NTSB report when it came out and can say there is nothing new in Run the Storm, I still found it hard to put down. The timeline is laid out pretty well, the language is not overly technical, and there is not much bias in regards to conditions that lead up to the disaster. The use of voice transcripts from the recovered ships "black box" were very effective in building the narrative. As for the reason I give this book only 4 stars, the writing could have been edited better. The language at time gets overly flowery like the author bent WAY over backwards to attempt prose when a simple description would have sufficed, and there are sentences that contain several commas and semicolons (as in several of both in a single sentence) that run on for an entire paragraph. That seemed to get worse in the latter half of the book.
  
  Glad I bought this book and I can say that last section describing when the ship went down, told almost entirely from the voice transcripts, was downright chilling.
• This is an excellent book with brilliant pacing, wonderful detail, real insight, and a compelling, enlightening story to tell about an isolated world that gets little recognition or understanding, despite its essential importance, and the people who inhabit it. It was hard to put down, especially as it gathered pace, and I can recommend it highly. There's a lot of technical detail, but it's balanced by the human side of the story, and the author does an outstanding job of explaining, as well as possible, an ending that is, by its very nature, completely incomprehensible to anyone still alive.