Review: Eakin, A Race Too Far

[truepenny]

This is the other book about the 1968/9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race (along with A Voyage for Madmen and The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst). It is in fact, in capsule summary, A Voyage for Madmen with interviews. Eakin doesn't have anything new to say about the race, but he's tracked down all the participants that are still living and are willing to be interviewed (John Ridgway declined), and he's done extensive interviews with Eve Tetley, Francoise Moitessier, and Clare and Simon Crowhurst. So the book was interesting for the different perspectives it offers (Clare Crowhurst loathes The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst) and it does give a better sense of the devastation that Crowhurst (fraud and suicide) Tetley (died two years later under very mysterious circumstances), and Moitessier (fucked off to Tahiti and screwed his wife over financially) left behind them, but I think A Voyage for Madmen is a better book.