Anthony Lane

This book I give four stars even though I have only browsed it - for it has the all-essential index, missing in so many books from smaller publishers, although the blank half-page would surely have allowed for an index of place names, sea features and the like.

Essentially a photograph album, the book makes clear the dangers of the sea, whether it's the weather, poor seamanship or just plain human error and bad luck. The photographs show the calamitous end that befalls some ships, ships that were the work of naval architects and human hands over months and years, ships that were once perhaps beautiful, certainly a place of work and home to mariners, ships that provided useful service to landlubbers worldwide, ships that cost their shipowners dear and, in the end, cost the insurance market or the government (in the case of a warship) dear too. Not just ships lost, often their cargoes lost and, sadly, all too often seafarers too.

The editor gets my vote for using italic script for the names of ships and vessels, but it is tedious reading two pages of italic script (pp 144 + 145) for accounts of rescues - that's a misuse of italics. Annoying when publishers can't use punctuation and script properly.

The simplified chart of the coastline and sea areas covered in this book is excellent - from Harwich to Eastbourne and from Zeebrugge to Boulogne.

I wonder what the incidence of shipwreck and other calamities for ships is? Fires on board are certainly not uncommon and minor accidents not uncommon in ships of all sizes - a ship is fairly dangerous a workplace - and, of course minor collisions and groundings are not uncommon either. In my career at sea, certainly I experienced fires large and small and other accidents but at least most warships, except the smallest, have trained medical staff and a sick bay. In the Royal Navy of my time (the last two decades of the Cold War), the ship's form for a Report of Collision or Grounding was an S.232 and that was the reason why the pennant number F232 was not used for the frigate HMS Marlborough (HMS Argyll was F231 and HMS Marlborough F233 - there was no F232!).

Do consider a donation to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution - the RNLI - that saves lives at sea.… (altro)

Excellent and witty anthology by the longtime New Yorker critic. Many of the film reviews had me snorting and snickering helplessly, as Lane is devastatingly funny about the movies he hates, and the profiles and other essays are thoughtful and thought-provoking even though I disagreed with some of his assessments. Being Jewish, female and gay, I have a much harder time making allowances for people who may have been wonderful writers but were also virulently anti-Semitic, misogynistic, etc. Aside from that, though, this collection is well worth the read; maybe nobody's perfect, but Lane comes pretty darn close.… (altro)