Interesting Detail About Fishing example essay topic

The Excitement of "The Perfect Storm" This book is a somewhat interesting book if the reader likes the basic facts about the subject. In "The Perfect Storm", Junger gives a lot of interesting detail about fishing yet there are a lot of useless facts that just don't keep the reader interested. The only few things that Junger writes about that makes one wonder what will happen is when they are back ashore and they are all at the Crow's Nest getting drunk. It makes the reader want to keep reading only to find out how they will turn out or what they might do especially spending at least $2000 in a two-week period on beer and liquor. Junger wrote, "Budweiser costs a dollar seventy-five, but as often as not there's a fisherman just in from a trip who's buying for the whole house. Money flows through a fisherman like water through a fishing net: one regular ran up a $4,000 tab in a week" (6).

It is also kind of amazing about how much food the fishermen have to buy to keep them fed through the trip. For example of all the food the fishermen have to buy Junger explains by writing "They grab fifty loaves of bread, enough to fill two carts. They take a hundred pounds of potatoes, thirty pounds of onions, twenty-five gallons of milk, eighty-dollar racks of steak... Bag by bag they carry out $4,000 worth of groceries" (39).

However, most of the book is filled with uninteresting detail that slows the story down such as when Junger wrote, "As early as the 1650's three-man crews were venturing up tot coast for a week at a time in small open boats that had stones for ballast and unstated masts" (25). There are many times in the book where Junger is writing about one thing and then out of the blue he just starts talking about the fishing in the old times for instance Junger writes "Cod was a blessing but could not alone have accounted for such riches. In 1816, a Cape Ann fisherman... ". (28). This is one of the really down sides to "The Perfect Storm".

If Junger would have not put as much emphasis on the history of fishing then the book would have been a little better to keep the reader interested instead of making them want to stop reading the book because there is nothing very interesting going on at that time. Finally, at the end of the book it is just a bad turn out because everyone in the boat dies from the storm. It is just hard to think that after all the things that the fishermen have gone through that they all just ended up dead without anyone there that could help them or being able to say goodbye to their loved ones. Junger writes "It's the morning of October 30th; there's been no word from the Andrea Gail in over thirty-six hours" (212). It is really sad to read about the feelings of the characters in the book. To just imagination how hard it would be to think that their loved ones are dead only because the helicopter couldn't lift the boat.

"The Perfect Storm" gives the reader both interesting and uninteresting thoughts and facts about fishing and the supplies needed to do so. It also has a bad ending that ruins everything in the book; by showing how easily the crew dies on the boat. To think that everything would have been all right if only the boat could have been lifted out of the water then the ending would have been less tragic.