UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont and Fire. As a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and as a contributor to ABC News, he has covered major international news stories in Liberia, Sierra Leone and other places around the globe. He has been awarded the National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism. Junger became a fixture in the national media when, as a first-time author, he commanded The New York Times best-seller list for more than three years with The Perfect Storm, which later set sales records and became a major motion picture from Warner Bros.
ONE midwinter day off the coast of Massachusetts, the crew of a mackerel schooner spotted a bottle with a note in it.
— from The Perfect Storm, 1997
Most acclaimed
Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--Gold Level
The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that moved beyond the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism and immersed themselves and their audiences in the world where they lived. First emerging in the late 1980s and coming to fruition in the 1990s, the experimental scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn catalyzed the largest New York renaissance to take root outside Manhattan. Rejecting the cloistering of the arts into disciplinary siloes, and stressing local vitality over the curatorial priorities of Manhattan, the Immersionists created fully dimensional experiences in the streets, rooftops and abandoned warehouses. Unlike the artificial immersion of digital media, and installation art that is walled off in a museum or gallery, the Brooklyn Immersionists cultivated rich webs of connection across disciplines and with their entire neighborhood. The dynamic, post-postmodern culture played a critical role in revitalizing Williamsburg’s deteriorating industrial waterfront and spread a wave of environmental enchantment to Bushwick, DUMBO, and throughout Brooklyn.
The Perfect Storm
1997
It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high --- a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." When it struck in October 1991, there was a virtually no warning. "She's comin; on, boys, and she's comin' on strong." radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrew Gail off the coast of Nova Scotia, and soon afterward the boat and its crew of six disappeared without a trace. In a narrative taut with the fury of the elements, Sebastian Junger takes us deep into the heart of the storm, depicting with vivid detail the courage, terror, and awe that surface in such a gale,. Junger illustrates a world of swordfishermen consumed by the dangerous but lucrative trade of offshore fishing ---"a young man's game, a single man's game" --- and gives us a glimpse of their lives in the tough fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts; he recreates the last moments of the Andrea Gail crew and recounts the daring high-seas rescues that made heroes of some and victims of others, and he weaves together the history of the fishing industry, the science of the storms, and the candid accounts of the people whos lives the storms touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that leaves us with the taste of salt air on our tongues and a breathless sense of what it feels like to be caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control. We know, on the strength of this stark and compelling journey into the dark heart of nature, what it feels like to drown.