SOURCE: "The Shipwreck Story No One Survived to Tell," in The New York Times, June 5, 1997, p. C20.

[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt praises Junger for "nicely pac[ing] his narrative" in The Perfect Storm.]

The title of Sebastian Junger's powerful book, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, is not meant to be celebratory. Rather, Mr. Junger, a freelance journalist, intends the phrase "perfect storm" to be read "in the meteorological sense: a storm that could not possibly have been worse."

As he reports at the height of his gripping story, when Bob Case, a meteorologist in the Boston office of the National Weather Service, observed the satellite imagery of three storm systems colliding off New England in late October 1991, he experienced a dreadful thrill.

"Meteorologists see perfection in strange things," Mr. Junger writes, "and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to...