If you're going to read this, you first need to grab a bottle of water because this book will make you very thirsty. This book is about the remarkable survival at sea of Thomas W. Nye, a seaman who was onboard the John Rutledge packet ship on it's doomed voyage from Liverpool to New York. It obviously didn't quite make it to NYC as it sunk shortly after encountering an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The book details the life of sailors in the 19th century and people traveling to America via wooden ships. There are a lot of little details in this book and it is definitely an interesting tale.

I can only give this book three stars because it just didn't have the 'staying power' that kept my attention for more than 30 minutes at a time. It does have a lot of details, like a two page, succinct explanation of the Irish potato famine which was good, but I think overall they bogged the story down. The most interesting part of the story was the sinking until the rescue, a total of about 90 pages. Long after the main character has returned to America the story just keeps going, including one section which went on for several pages just to tell the reader that the main character was once in the same room with Mark Twain. That's it. They weren't buddies or anything, they were just in the same place at the same time. I felt like the author was really reaching, stretching to get Mark Twain in or maybe to increase the page numbers. And this book does make you thirsty, as those 90 pages are full of characters who are very thirsty. There is no mention of sex or adult language. There is one bottle of alcohol in the entire book. This is an interesting book, if a little long-winded.