Book of the Week

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

I’m sure I would not have ordered this book had I not just finished watching “Octopus Teacher.” (See above.) I was deep in the beautiful mysteries of the oceans and didn’t want to come out of the water.

The Wave, I’d read, was a NYT bestseller. How could that be?

One reason, I discovered, was that Susan Casey is a very good writer. Another is that she writes about very exciting topics – in this case, giant waves. The 70- to 80-foot waves that extreme surfers like Laird Hamilton ride, but also the even bigger rogue waves and tsunamis that exceed 100 feet and can actually break an 800-foot ship in two like snapping a pencil.

The Wave is chock full of exciting stories about disappearing ships, as well as the history of giant waves, the new science behind them, and such fascinating miscellany as how Lloyd’s of London insures against them.

I’m only a third of the way into it, at this point, but I can already feel the excitement of the ride.

Click here to watch a talk that Casey gave about the book at a bookstore in California.

And click here to watch a TED Talk – “ Dispatches from the Dark Heart of the Ocean” – that she gave in Maui.

 About the Author 

Susan Casey, author of the NYT bestseller The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks, is editor-in-chief of O, The Oprah Magazine. She is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. Her work has also appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Outside, and National Geographic. Casey lives in New York City and Maui.

 Reviews of The Wave 

 “Immensely powerful, beautiful, addictive, and, yes, incredibly thrilling…. Like a surfer who is happily hooked, the reader simply won’t be able to get enough of it.” – San Francisco Chronicle 

“[An] adrenaline rush of a book…. As terrifying as it is awe inspiring.” 
– People

“Casey’s descriptions of these monsters are as gripping in their own way as any mountaineering saga from the frozen peaks of Everest or K2.” – The Washington Post Book World 
 

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