Author Description

Review "Makes fascinating sense of Crowhurst's madness." -- Sailing"One of the most extraordinary stories about the sea ever to be published." -- The Washington Post"The authors... have endeavored here to tell the whole story of Donald Crowhurst, and they have written a masterpiece." -- The New Yorker"The sea drama of the century." -- Sir Francis Chichester Product Description In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set out from England in his untested trimaran, a competitor in the first singlehanded nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, the boat was found in mid-Atlantic with no one on board. Crowhurst's logs and diaries revealed that, although he had radioed messages from his supposed round-the-world course, he had in fact never left the Atlantic. This journalistic masterpiece reconstructs what happened: Crowhurst's growing distrust of his boat; his first decision to attempt one of the great hoaxes of our time; the lying radio transmissions; the ``triumphal'' return up the Atlantic as the elapsed-time race leader; and the fantastic ending. The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is both a suspenseful narrative and a psychological casebook of human zeal and anguish. About the Author Nicholas Tomalin was literary editor for the New Stateman and a featured columnist for the Daily Express, the Sunday Times, and the Evening Standard of London. He was nominated Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the war in Vietnam. Ron Hall is a leading British journalist. He was cofounder of the Sunday Times' (London) "Insight," where he was editor from 1964 - 66, and he became joint managing editor of the Sunday Times in 1969. Jonathan Raban is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the editor of The Oxford Book of the Sea, and author of ten critically acclaimed books, including Passage to Juneau. He is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Heinemann Award for Literature, and received the New York Ti