Under the Eye of the Storm is about two couples, Tom and Audrey and Flick and Dottie, who are vacationing on Tom’s sailboat when hurricane Esme hits them. Despite the boat being named Harmony, there is no harmony on board. Both couples have marital conflicts, Tom (who we see the story through) has conflicts within himself, and there is the obvious conflict with nature when the hurricane arrives. As the storm gets closer, the conflicts get more pronounced. The four end up riding out the hurricane in the ocean because they couldn’t get to a marina with open moorings in time. After it’s all over and the others are talking about their experiences, Tom notices how they remember things differently than he does, and he’s left wondering whether things really happened the way he saw them, whether the perceptions and memories of the others are distorted, or whether a little of both has happened.

Hersey’s books are hit of miss for me. He has some great ones (Hiroshima and A Bell for Adano) and some not-so-great ones (A Single Pebble and Letters to the Alumni). This one fell right in the middle for me. It started out slow, introduced some interesting ideas, ran on for over 100 pages without a break, and introduced some more interesting ideas in the last chapter. The symbolism and other literary devices were pretty good, but the structure wasn’t as good. The 100 page chapter about their experiences between the time the hurricane first hit and the time they reached the eye of the storm really started to get boring after a while, and this made it hard to pay attention to some of the important things that showed up every dozen pages or so. Overall, the good and bad parts of the book kind of canceled each other out and left me thinking, “So what?” ( )