In the Heart of the Sea

It's easy to see how reading Moby Dick led me to In the Heart of the Sea; the story of the sinking of the Essex helped inspire Melville to write his great classic. It's also easy to see why I loved this book; In the Heart of the Sea is the mesmerizing true tale of a ship in the early nineteenth century sunk by the wrath of a whale and the desperation of its crew of twenty to survive in three small whale boats for three months. Only eight men lived, and it's the story of their struggle that is, at once, both amazing and horrifying.