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Jun 23, 2020 | ISBN 9780593080832 Buy
Sep 04, 2019 | ISBN 9780593081075 Buy
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Jun 23, 2020 | ISBN 9780593080832
Sep 04, 2019 | ISBN 9780593081075
Dr. Tom Medlar’s sailboat, the Harmony, is his pride and joy, and the focus of more lavish and meticulous care than he affords to either his career or his marriage. But then one day Tom takes his wife, Audrey, and their friends, Flick and Dottie Hamden, out for a pleasure cruise and into the unexpected path of a hurricane. As the deadly storm rages around them, the fault lines in the friendships and marriages begin to crack, and John Hersey’s riveting adventure story rapidly becomes something deeper and more unsettling. Widely praised on its initial publication in 1967, Under the Eye of the Storm remains a masterpiece of psychological fiction from one of the most accomplished authors of the twentieth century.
This is a tale of the sea, of two men and their wives on a sailboat, moving toward the heart of a great storm. It is an adventure story that carries four travelers on the yawl Harmony from Edgartown to Menemsha to Block Island and thence out into a huge, dark cone of uncertainty. In the modulating airs of the voyage four personalities emerge to work changes on each other. The two marriages seem to react to the barometer. As the drama of the storm gathers and breaks, themes are sounded of escape and confrontatoin, of illusion, of the “secret place” that every boat and every person harbors, of a meticulousness, a prudent attention to the details of life, which can blind a man to the whole of reality, and also of endurance, of instinctively courageous seamanship, and of strength that the strong may not know they possess even as they exert it. The skipper, a young doctor, follows his obsession to the terrible goal to which it must lead him at the moment wehn the calm eye of the storm looks down on the tiny boat in the violent sea. The four visions of the characters, which seem to have been focused on the one experience, reveal themselves as sharply at variance with each other, so that a final “truth” of the story has to be bargained out. And in the end that truth turns out to be an irony.
John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several… More about John Hersey
“A tight, suspenseful tale.” —The Wall Street Journal “An impressive and haunting piece of work, one that keeps an unremitting grip on the imagination long after the reader has put it down.” —Saturday Review“Fascinating. . . . Under the Eye of the Storm brings four extremely contemporary people into a tight, primitive situation of great danger, and watches them tick.” —Denver Post
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