I just finished reading In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick and it was so good, and I've been so bored lately, that I felt an urge to get my thoughts down on paper. Metaphorically. 
 Even if you've never read Herman Melville's Moby Dick (I haven't), you've heard some form of the phrase "There she blows!" (Pronounced, of course, 'thar'), or you know of the great white whale that the captain obsessively hunts like a fat boy chasing an ice cream truck. 
 (Hint: Both end poorly) 
 Anyway, back to the point, this non-fiction novel details the events which formed the basis for Melville's novel. My main thought: he chose one hell of an event to base his book on. 
 Warning: Thar be spoilers ahead! 
 In the Heart of the Sea follows the crew of the old and worn down Essex, a whaling ship from the island of Nantucket off the coast of Maine, as it rounds the tip of South America and hunts for whales right smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 
 From its genesis, the voyage was pretty much set up for disaster and the only question was how much shit this crew would have to go through. Oh, and how many would survive, of course. 
 Recipe for poisson a la desastre: A lack of experience and available resources, an old battered boat, and one seriously pissed off sperm whale. 
 Long story short, the sperm whale decides that it's tired of giving up its blubber so easily, and rams the Essex multiple times until it sinks. The men scrambled to their three smaller crafts, saved as much of the food as they could, and then realized that they're in the middle of the largest ocean in the world. 
 The rest of the book details the crew's attempt to make it back to civilized land. I won't ruin the surprise, but I'll say that some make it, most don't, and there's quite a bit of cannibalism. 
 Philbrick doesn't hold back at any point in his vivid descriptions of the bloody 19th century practice of whaling, nor does he let the reader off easy with any of the accounts of murder, cannibalism or despair. 
 Aside from journals written by some of the survivors, Philbrick draws from other accounts of sea voyages from the 19th century to help paint a clear picture of their circumstances, as well as a study of starvation victims done in concentration camps during World War II. 
 If you have any interest in life at sea, or the war between hope and despair in survival situations, you should do yourself a favor and pick up this book. Or, if for some reason you've subjected yourself to the torture of reading Melville, this book will provide you with a wonderful lens in which to view Moby Dick.