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Outstanding
The Gales of NovemberThe Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald
John U. Bacon's The Gales of November turns the 1975 sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald into patient, deeply reported narrative nonfiction, tracing the Great Lakes shipping boom that built the ship before reconstructing its final hours through the families left behind. It's maritime history for readers who want the human cost as much as the storm.
From the review
On November 10, 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went off the radar about seventeen miles short of the shelter at Whitefish Bay, and nothing more was heard from her. Her last message, sent minutes earlier, had been almost unremarkable: "We are holding our own." Then nothing. All twenty-nine men aboard died in a Lake Superior storm that nobody watching from shore fully understood until the ship stopped answering, and not one of their bodies was ever recovered from the water that took her down. That gap, the fifty years of not quite knowing what happened in the ship's last minutes, is what John U. Bacon spends this book closing, and the argument underneath The Gales of November is that you can't actually close it with wreckage and instrument readings. You close it with the people the ship left behind. Bacon gets to the storm slowly, and on purpose. The opening stretch of the book is Great Lakes shipping as an industry: the postwar decades when the region powered the world economy, the freighters that carried it, and the jobs aboard, from captain and mates to wheelmen, oilers, and cooks. Readers hoping for the wreck on page one will be waiting a while, and it's a fair complaint that the run-up is long. But it does real work. By the time the Fitzgerald sails into the November storm, you know what a wheelman does, why a ship her age and size was considered safe, and why an experienced captain would keep pushing through weather he'd normally have waited out.
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