cover image OCEAN WARRIORS: The Thrilling Story of the 2001/2002 Volvo Ocean Race Around the World

OCEAN WARRIORS: The Thrilling Story of the 2001/2002 Volvo Ocean Race Around the World

Rob Mundle, Robert Mundle, . . HarperCollins, $25.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-06-050808-1

Mundle (The Fatal Storm) recounts the nine months he spent aboard the Team News Corp boat in last year's Volvo Ocean Race, and all the excitement and setbacks that ensued. The nine-leg VOR has been held every four years over the past three decades. This 32,000-nautical mile race offers no prize money; participants brave temperature extremes, squalid living conditions, and sometimes 60-knot winds and seas "like liquid cliffs" just so they can sharpen the razor's edge. After incisive anecdotes in early passages, this chronicle soon suffers from too rigid a structure and not enough real-time storytelling. Mundle jettisons putting a face on the umpteen principals, and instead relies on excerpts from their observations, which disrupts the narrative and melds people (and events) into one another. It's like reading the transcripts of a gripping documentary, when all you really want to do is watch the movie. His set-up and wrap-up of individual adventures, including a skipper's gamble to sail between two iceberg peaks and crew members circumnavigation of a most unwelcome tornado, are indeed nail-biting, but the outcome's often foretold. Only as the race draws to a close does the action unfold in straightforward exposition. (Nov.)