Fitzgerald
Great book. If you have any intrest in this subject you will not be disapointed. Gives many facts to support the mythes that are out there.
Haunting
This was a great read! Very sad, haunting story, yet very interesting and factual.
The Legend Lives On!
I remember hearing about the Fitzgerald when I was a kid going through the Soo Locks tour and was always curious about the details. This book does a good job reveiwing the loss of the Fitzgerald and provides a lot of info on the possible causes for the wreckage. To this day there's no single concrete explantion for why it went down. While the author has a definite opinion on what most likely happened he does a good presenting all the possible theories and suggesting why they do or do not make sense. A good book, I'd recommend it.
A Thorough Review of The Case
I found much of this "Casebook," as I see it very illuminating, with regard to the sinking of the Fitzgerald.
What I liked were the text reports from the Coast Guard and the Lake Carriers Association, along with the statistics and other official information. This goes a long way toward fitting in with what Stonehouse writes, in terms of his own experience as a diver.
The interview excerpts were also interesting, with some questions that needed to be asked.
While I understand Stonehouse's views on the Coast Guard, and how they were obviously not prepared, this does not mean that under the circumstances they are inept.
Look at the situation: The Fitzgerald's captain knew he was in trouble. While he did not panic, he signalled the Arthur Anderson that he needed help, that he had a list, had lost two vents and was taking on water. He also slowed down to make sure someone was close.
McSorley also made a run for it, the only thing he could have done. In those terrible seas, he could not have stopped, could not have relied on the Anderson's crew, and no doubt knew the Coast Guard did not have the means to make a rescue at sea. He did what he had to do, and I'd have done exactly the same.
I do hope the Guard is better prepared, especially now, with year round sailing and those thousand foot tubs.
Stonehouse does point out some very important points...those boats needed waterright bulkheads, better mandated rescue gear and equipment such as EPIRBs. I'm no sailor, and I don't know for sure, but I hope that stuff is now on those boats.
One other little PS: Stonehouse sails as close as he can get without libeling an author named Jay Gourlay, who postulated in various books and on an old "In Search Of" program that as there is no set verdict, no possibilities can be dropped. So, in his head, UFOs are possible.
Please...first of all, there was no UFO activity over the lakes, and if there was, how could anyone tell?
Overall, a good sobering read.
Stonehouse has a serious beef with the Coast Guard.
Others have called this the "definitive account" of the Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking, and it certainly is comprehensive. Stonehouse takes all the facts as they are known and lays them out for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. He also (and this is highly commendable) includes the actual texts of the various documents pertaining to the sinking, along with pictures, sketches and diagrams, to give the reader as much of the evidence as possible.
However in the section entitled "A Conspiracy of Ineptitude," Stonehouse goes off onto a tangential rant about the incompetency of the modern Coast Guard and how they are not prepared for lifesaving on the Great Lakes and their equipment is outmoded and their training is inadequate and so on and so forth and boy, aren't the Coast Guard just a bunch of sorry yokels? all of which has very little to do with the Fitz's sinking. Now it may be entirely possible that the Coast Guard is in a dreary state today, and I'm sure that most right-thinking people would agree that the Coast Guard should have the facilities it needs to do its job. Can't argue with that. However, as even Stonehouse admits several times, there was nothing the Coast Guard *could* have done on the night of the Fitz's sinking, even under optimum conditions, because the ship just went down too fast. Therefore, his hatin' on the Coast Guard is seriously irrelevant to the topic of the book, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (This may be why he saved it for an epilogue; but really, no more than a brief mention is necessary, and Stonehouse could have/should have saved this for another book--it might have gotten more attention in that way as well.)
The book is also somewhat confusingly organized; the primary documents are in the *middle* of the book for some reason when they could have been saved for an appendix, and the same could be said for the photo sections. There apparently also seems to have been more sections added for the 1996 rerelease of the book, and these were simply and oddly appended at the back of the book; though they could easily have been worked in with the main text.
The negatives here, however, are mostly minor stylistic stuff; the substance of the book is good, solid, and well-documented (indeed, Stonehouse's inclusion of the primary texts is invaluable). For anyone interested in researching the sinking of the Fitzgerald, this book is a must read.
(11 reviews)
