He reveals what life is like for the modern fisherman, including the many hazards of the sea and the inevitable toll that the lifestyle wreaks on one’s personal life.

The book starts with a vivid description of life in Gloucester, a rough and tumble town built on the ship building and fishing industries that has struggled ever since the cod were fished out many years ago. The result was published in 1997 and went on to be an acclaimed best-seller, revitalizing the genre of creative non-fiction at the same time. Having grown up in the Boston area, Junger was well aware of the story and while recovering from an injury he sustained while working as an arborist, he decided to write about it. The details surrounding their demise remain unknown. Unfortunately, their route took them directly into the center of this unprecedented maelstrom and they were never heard from again. The six men on board were heading back from a successful trip along Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, some of the richest fishing waters in the world. It was a nor’easter from hell, producing winds up to 120 miles per hour and waves over 100 feet high. In October 1991, a commercial swordfishing boat – the Andrea Gail, out of Gloucester, Massachusetts – ran into one of the nastiest patches of bad weather the area had ever seen.

What if you don’t know what happened? What if it’s practically unknowable? How do you piece together a story when your subject matter is somewhere on the bottom of the ocean? Undeterred, journalist Sebastian Junger decided to write The Perfect Storm, overcoming this formidable obstacle surefootedly. One of the problems with non-fiction writing is that the events one writes about are supposed to have actually happened.

The perfect storm by sebastian junger