This is an eccentric little book. It briefly describes 61 maritime disasters starting with the General Slokum in 1904 and ending with the Kursk in 2000. And by ‘briefly’ I do mean briefly. Each wreck is covered in about a page to a page and a half. Some chapters are just a few paragraphs long. As you can imagine, only the most basic details of each incident can be mentioned in such short chapters. The Titanic disaster gets almost (but not quite) two full pages.

The format of the book itself is quite unusual. The pages have a mimeographed look to them, many with lines running down through the text block. Only the front side of each page is used for the text, the back of each page reprints the table of contents. On the back of every single page! Then there is the binding, which is terrible. The signatures (groups of pages) are unevenly glued together, then a wraparound paper cover is glued to the spine. Even reading through the book once (and I am very careful with my books) caused the binding to start splitting. Unless I was inadvertently sent some kind of knockoff copy, this is truly one of the worst bindings I have seen in many years.

Finally, some on-line sites have appended the K-19 Widowmaker disaster to the title, probably to tie-in with the Harrison Ford movie that was released this past summer. Don’t you believe it! There is exactly one paragraph, three sentences long, on the K-19 disaster in the book.

If you know almost nothing about maritime disasters of the last century, this book could be described as a starting off point, but you will need to look elsewhere to learn anything of significance about these events.