Alone

October 9, 2017
In this intense memoir, Archibald describes how in the middle of the night in 2013, he fell into the Indian Ocean while vomiting off the side of a boat he and his friends had chartered for a birthday surfing trip. For the next 28 hours he struggled to survive as he fought off a shark, jellyfish, and birds and struggled with his own fears and regrets. His friends discovered his disappearance eight hours after he fell overboard and launched a rescue effort that was hindered by bad weather and a lack of emergency resources in the area. Luckily, they happened on a group of Australians who also had hired a boat for their own surfing adventure; that boat’s captain, “a hostage to his past” who had saved himself from his own “demons,” saw it as his duty to find Archibald. The narrative approach can be disconcerting, however: Archibald writes in the first person as he describes his struggles in the water, then switches to third person when writing about himself from his friends’ and family’s perspectives (“Brett was notable, even admired, for his high-spirited misbehavior”). Nevertheless, this survival tale pairs action with emotion and feels ready-made for the big screen.

October 1, 2017
It was supposed to be a fun outing, a group of middle-aged friends on a chartered boat, crossing the Mentawai Strait in the Indian Ocean. A birthday celebration. Then Brett, stricken with food poisoning as a storm at sea raged around the boat, passed out and fell overboard. And nobody on the boat noticed for several hours. Brett spent the next day and a little more in the ocean, desperately trying to stay alive. Alternating between chapters detailing his life-and-death struggle in the water and chapters about the race-against-time rescue effort, the book is a gripping and sometimes emotionally draining account of survival against almost insurmountable odds. Archibald is a graceful storyteller, as adept at describing the physical challenges of staying alive (such as, for example, a brush with a shark) as he is at describing the mental challenges. There is a robust literature about people surviving alone at seaSteven Callahan's Adrift (1986), Jonathan Franklin's 438 Days (2015), and Matt Lewis' Last Man Off (2014), among othersand Archibald's compelling account fits in very nicely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)