The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean [VINTAGE 2010]

As new condition light blue boards, white spine and silver spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Book(s) by Susan Casey; Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche; Introduction; Epilogue; Acknowledgments; Selected Bibliography; Illustration Credits and A Note About the Author. "Something is stewing in our seas, and Casey - traveling, and in some cases swimming, all around the world - is eager to find out what it is. Both a rollicking look at the ocean's growing freakishness and a troubling examination of our ailing planet, The Wave gives new meaning to the term 'immersion reporting.'" - Hampton Sides, author. "At once scary and fun, The Wave surprises at every turn." - Elizabeth Kolbert, author. "Like the surfers and scientists she profiles, Casey lived and breathed giant waves for years, combining an insane passion for craft with an uncanny ability to describe the indescribable. In The Wave she whisks the reader off to unimaginably surreal settings and puts them in the middle of mind-blowing scenarios. This book sucked me in like the undertow at Pipeline." - Mary Roach, author. "From Susan Casey, the bestselling author of The Devil's Teeth, an astonishing book about colossal, ship-swallowing waves, and the surfers and scientists who seek them out. For centuries, mariners have spun stories of gargantuan rogue waves, one hundred feet high or more, appearing seemingly from nowhere. Until recently scientists dismissed these stories as typical sailor tall tales - because waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, a startling number of ships vanished in the depths of the ociean - massive freighters sunk so quickly there was often no time for an SOS call - and credible eyewitenss accounts emerged, such as one from the captain of the Queen Elizabeth 2, who swore the liner was hit by a wave taller than the ninety-five-foot bridge. Faced with mounting evidence, marine scientists realized something truly scary was brewing in the planet's waters. They found their proof in February 2000, when the British research vessel RRS Discovery was trapped in the North Atlantic in a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves, including several that approached one hundred feet. As scientists scramble to understand the phenomenon of immense waves, another breed of people view them as the ultimate challenge. These are extreme surfers, who scan global weather updates on dedicated websites and fly around the world looking for the ocean's monsters. That this is possible at all is due to the pioneering techniques of legendary surfer Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in Hawaii, figured out how to ride terrifyingly large wavees of seventy and eighty feet. When a surf company offered a huge bounty to be given to the first person to ride a hundred-foot wave, less-accomplished surfers entered the sport, and the stakes became life or death. Susan Casey does a magnificent job painting the extraordinary subculture of this unique tribe of people - their codes, their addiction to risks that others would view as borderline insane, their amazing physical feats, and their feeling for the infinite strength of the ocean. In Casey's mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow extreme surfers are juxtaposed against the scientists' urgent efforts to understand the annihilating power of waves, from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific in 2004 (and the tsunami that could arise in the Atlantic and sweep the East Coast of the United States), to the threat to the global shipping system, to the 1,740-foot wave that leveled part of the Alaskan coast. With inexorable, adrenaline-fueled verve, The Wave brilliantly portrays human beings confronting nature at its most ferocious." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.…