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The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean »

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

Authors: Susan Casey
ISBN-13: 9780767928847, ISBN-10: 0767928849
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: September 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: Susan Casey

SUSAN CASEY, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Devil’s Teeth, is the  Editor-in-Chief of O, the Oprah Magazine, and has also served as creative director of Outside magazine.

Book Synopsis

From Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Devil’s Teeth, an astonishing book about colossal,  ship-swallowing rogue waves and the surfers who seek them out.

For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dis­missed these stories—waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, as a startling number of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized something scary was brewing in the planet’s waters. They found their proof in February 2000, when a British research vessel was trapped in a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea—including several that approached 100 feet.

As scientists scramble to understand this phenomenon, others view the giant waves as the ultimate challenge. These are extreme surfers who fly around the world trying to ride the ocean’s most destructive monsters. The pioneer of extreme surfing is the legendary Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in Hawaii, figured out how to board suicidally large waves of 70 and 80 feet. Casey follows this unique tribe of peo­ple as they seek to conquer the holy grail of their sport, a 100­-foot wave.

In this mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow surfers are juxtaposed against scientists’ urgent efforts to understand the destructive powers of waves—from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific in 2004 to the 1,740-foot-wave that recently leveled part of the Alaskan coast.

Like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, The Wave brilliantly portrays human beings confronting nature at its most ferocious.

The New York Times - Holly Morris

Casey makes a convincing, entertaining case (nifty cliffhangers and all) that there is a heretofore little-known monster in our midst…Casey is fluent in "gnarly" and proficient in "wonk," and she writes lucidly so the rest of us can come along for the ride…[a] wonderfully vivid, kinetic narrative…

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