SOURCE: "'Gail'-Force Wins," in Entertainment Weekly, August 1, 1997, pp. 66-7.

[In the following review, De Haven asserts that Junger's A Perfect Storm is "[f]erociously dramatic and vividly written."]

Who'd have figured that bad weather—really bad weather—would enthrall beach readers this summer? In late October 1991, the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., was returning home when a freak convergence of three storm systems engulfed it several hundred miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. With shrieking winds and waves like piggybacked dinosaurs, the "Halloween Gale" was a once-in-a-century event, a fisherman's worst nightmare, or, as Sebastian Junger calls it, The Perfect Storm. While Junger's surprise best-seller (no serial killers! no sex! no Hollywood!) encompasses everything from meteorology to shipbuilding to the rough-and-tumble sociology of New England port towns, his focus never strays far from the promise of his subtitle: A True Story of Men...