Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival - Five stars book review

 

BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS

Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival by Michael Tougias

Gripping, exciting, and fast moving!

I don’t remember ever reading anything the equal of this well-written and exquisitely edited one-of-a-kind true life thriller.

My wife Jane and I both spent many years of our lives out to sea as captains and navigators, and we can’t believe our good fortune surviving our learning experience that generated four Travels of Dursmirg sailing books.

EXCERPTS

He glances down and notices a bottle of Yuengling beer floating in the water. God damn it, I’m going to have a beer. He snatches the bottle out of the sloshing seawater, and returns to his perch. Bloody hell, this may be my last beer, might as well enjoy it. He taps a cigarette from his pack, lights it, and enjoys a long leisurely smoke with his beer.

The Gulf Stream’s current may have been partially responsible for the two unusually large waves that hit the Almeisan, as well as the two that clobbered the At Ease two days earlier. Some experts now think rogue waves technically defined as any waves more than twice the height for the average current sea state are to be expected in the Gulf Stream in stormy weather because of the explosive combination of wind and sea current.

The kind Loch is most worried about is the mako, both the short-fin and long-fin mako; the latter can grow to thirteen feet in length and weigh 1,400 pounds. Both makos are fast, and the short-fin is said to be able to reach bursts of speed topping thirty-five miles per hour and jump close to twenty feet out of the water. Neither is the shy, retiring type, and more than one mako, having been hooked by an angler, has jumped out of the water and into the boat, fighting its tormentors in the cockpit. And in rare instances, a mako has freed itself from the hook, only to come back and ram the boat.

The International Game Fish Association says the short-fin mako is the undisputed leader in attacks on boats.

The actions of a sleep-deprived person are often similar to those of someone who is drunk, and the ramifications can be just as disastrous. Loch has had no sleep since Friday night because of seasickness on Saturday and being pitched into the sea early Sunday morning. No sleep in more than forty hours combined with expending incredible reasoning skills will slowly decrease the longer he stays awake, but he’s facing another issue due to sleep deprivation, hallucinations, which might have graver consequences.

Although a person may see most of his surroundings correctly, imaginary images may be interjected or a real image altered.

The person is conscious, but loses the ability to tell the difference between self-generated and real external stimuli

Initial hallucination begins not with his immediate desires, such as the vision of a ship, a life raft, a bed, or drinking water, but with a Nautilus weight-training

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Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William J Duiker - Book Review Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William J Duiker

The extraordinary life of Ho Chi Minh not only had an immense impact on Vietnamese and US history but world history as well.

 America hasn’t won a war since 1945.

Now the struggle is for global economic supremacy, and that is changing at lightning speed.

This book is a great eye-opening look at that ever changing power struggle.

EXCERPTS

To many who met him, Vietnamese and foreigners alike, he was a sweet guy who, despite his prominence as a major world leader, was actually a selfless patriot with a common touch and a lifelong commitment to the cause of bettering the lives of his fellow Vietnamese. Critics, however, pointed to the revolutionary excesses committed in his name and accused him of being a chameleon personality, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh’s colleagues, some of whom are still in power in Hanoi today, have tirelessly drawn on his memory to sanctify the Communist model of national development. Ho’s goal throughout his long career, they allege, was to bring an end to the global system of capitalist exploitation and create a new revolutionary world characterized by the Utopian vision of Karl Marx. A few dissenting voices, however, have argued that the central message of his career was the determination to soften the iron law of Marxist class struggle by melding it with Confucian ethics and the French revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In justification, they point to one of Ho’s slogans, which is seen everywhere on billboards in Vietnam today:

“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.”

The country that French warships had attacked was no stranger to war or foreign invasion. Indeed, few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate and independent state than had the Vietnamese.

In August 1939, Party cadres had frequently encountered problems in explaining why Stalin had chosen to ally his country with Hitler’s Germany, widely viewed as the archenemy of the world revolution. By late June 1941, however, word of the German attack on the USSR reached the border area and undoubtedly facilitated Nguyen Ai Quoc’s effort to coordinate the activities of the ICP with the global struggle against world fascism. As he explained it on one occasion: The fascists have attacked the Soviet Union, the fatherland of the world revolution, but the Soviet peoples will definitely be against the fascists.

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