Review: Goss & Behe, Lost at Sea

[truepenny]

Lost At Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries by Michael Goss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is SO WEIRD.

It starts out as a discussion of folklore--the Flying Dutchman and so forth--and there's a fascinating couple of chapters about submarines, and then it takes a sudden HARD left into paranormal and psychic phenomena surrounding shipwrecks. Granted that much of the folklore is about ghosts, I still feel like I only barely kept on the road through the turn. It continued to be fascinating, but in a quite different way. They went from stories about shipwrecks to what I guess you might call testimony about shipwrecks. And they ended with the Queen Mary, which is notoriously haunted (I've seen that terrible episode of Unsolved Mysteries) but not a shipwreck at all.

It's a very well written and engaging book; I don't entirely mind that it changed projects in the middle, because I continued to be engaged by it, but either they had a couple of different books that they just sort of smooshed together into one, or their original intentions got hijacked by the Titanic (Behe is the VP of the Titanic Historical Society, so there's a degree to which that's not surprising, either).

Full confession: I loved this book all the way through, because it's weird and morbid and full of ghost stories, but I recognize my own biases here. Nevertheless, five stars.



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