Review: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

[truepenny]

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Tomalin & Hall were both reporters who covered the story, and their book came out in 1970; give how close they were to the story, I think it's a very fair and even-handed account. They don't sympathize at all with Crowhurst's fraud, but they do empathize with the way he becomes more and more tightly trapped by the consequences of his own actions, and with the reasons he started down this terrible path in the first place. They do an excellent job of using their primary sources--Crowhurst's log books and associated papers and the abandoned Teignmouth Electron herself--to piece together the story of what happened while Crowhurst was pretending he was sailing 'round the world, and there's something brilliantly calm and rational about the way that they explore the written evidence of Crowhurst's psychotic break. I've read this book twice and probably need to own a copy so I can keep rereading it on occasion.



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