Candace G. (Ogre) reviewed on 7/9/2009 + 1568 more book reviews

I can't describe the book better than the blurb on the back, except to say that the writer makes you feel that you are very nearly personally with him on that drifting wreck of a raft. The broiling sun is roasting you and the Atlantic waves crashing and tumbling over you, over and over---over and over---over and over . . .

From back cover: On the night of January 29, 1982, Steven Callahan set sail in his small sloop from the Canary Islands bound for the Caribbean. Thus began one of the most astounding voyages of the century and one of the great sea adventures of all time.

Six days out the sloop sank, and Callahan found himself adrift in the Atlantic in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, with only three pounds of food and eight pints of water. Here is the riveting first-hand account of the only man in history to have survived more than a month alone at sea in an inflatable raft.

Racked by hunger, buffeted by storms, and broiled by the tropical sun, Callahan drifted for seventy-six days over eighteen hundred miles of ocean. He fought off sharks with a makeshift spear and watched nine ships pass by without turning back . . . he distilled water by the spoonful with a primitive still, and wasted to just over a hundred pounds, living on a sparse diet of raw fish.

Here is a story of anguish and horror, of undying he5roism and hope . . . the story of a man who peered into the darkest regions of nature and of his own soul--and survived to tell the harrowing tale.

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