I can't quite put my finger on it, but it strikes me that there's a certain strain of superfluousness in the contemporary narrative nonfiction genre. I get the vague sense that there are all too many books coming out that are merely reheating slices of history that have been well documented, but in a way that makes them more digestible to the modern reader. This National Book Award winner is a perfect example. The "Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" isn't exactly obscure -- Herman Melville drew upon it for Moby Dick, two accounts by survivors of the actual events exist, and Thomas Hefferman's Stove By a Whale hits pretty much all the parts of the story one really needs to know. So, while this book does flesh it all out a good deal more (and offers a great deal of added conjecture), it never feels particularly vital.

Which is not to say it's not a decent read. That is, assuming you're interested in the popular nonfiction survival stories where men battle the elements, face great dangers, and at least some of them make it home to tell the tale (books like Into Thin Air, Endurance, Alive, The Perfect Storm, etc.). It's not the kind of thing I usually pick up, but I read it for my book club and consider myself marginally glad I did so. The short version is that a Nantucket whaling ship set out in 1820 to harvest the seas and winds up sunk by a belligerent whale. The crew attempt to survive for something like 3 months on the open seas -- some are eaten by others and some make it home. The book is quite good a certain things: harrowing descriptions of starvation, the economics of 19th-century whaling, and the closed society of 19th-century Nantucket island. In fact, the parts describing the Quaker whaling society were the most interesting part of the book for me -- much more so than the drawn-out plight of the men adrift on the sea.

I certainly wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this, but nor would I give it a blanket recommendation. I guess if you like narrative nonfiction that casts its eye on some distant event and milks every last word from it, you could do a lot worse than this. Personally, I could have been satisfied with a longish essay on the topic instead.