Another Great Day at Sea (eBook)

Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush

GEOFF DYER (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
208 Seiten
Canongate Books (Verlag)
978-1-78211-335-5 (ISBN)

Infos

''We were on one of the technologically most advanced places on earth but the guys in grease-smeared brown sweat shirts and floatcoats, draped with heavy brown chains, looked like they were ready to face the burning oil poured on them from the walls of an impregnable castle. The combination of medieval (chains) and sci-fi (cranials and dark visors) didn''t quite cover it though; there was also an element of the biker gang about them. All things considered, theirs was one of the toughest, roughest looks going. No wonder they stood there, lounging with the grace of heavy gun-slingers about to sway into the saloon.'' In November 2011, Geoff Dyer fulfilled a childhood dream: spending time on an aircraft carrier. Geoff ''s stay on the USS George Bush - on active service in the Arabian Gulf - proved even more intense, memorable - and frequently hilarious - than he could ever have hoped. The warship become a microcosm for a stocktaking of modern Western life: Religion, drugs, chauvinism, farting, gyms, steaks, prayer, parental death, relationships and how to have a beach party with 5000 people on a giant floating hunk of steel. Piercingly perceptive and gloriously funny, this is a unique book about work, war and entering other worlds.

Autor

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

Rezensionen

Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully

Another Great Day at Sea, Geoff Dyer's chronicle of his two weeks in residence aboard the USS George H. W. Bush, is a tale of routine, lyricism and terror, of long hours and hard work, and of camaraderie and conviction, which are a form of faith. Original, humane, and very funny, Another Great Day is another great book by an incomparable writer

I hope one day to meet the demented genius who decided to put Geoff Dyer aboard an American aircraft carrier. The result sounds in places as if Sterne en route to his sentimental journey had paused for a week's stint on HMS Victory . . . In the end one is forced to call it "a Dyer book," which luckily for him and us is a high compliment

One of my favourite of all contemporary writers

A great day is any day you get to read Geoff Dyer, and this book is no exception. Witty, empathetic, and insatiably curious, Dyer is the perfect guide to the floating world of an American aircraft carrier. With Another Great Day at Sea he makes a perfect night landing on the "postage stamp, with �lan to spare"

Dyer stows himself away on an American aircraft carrier, fortunately, with all his hilarious tics in place. A rare kind of non-fiction, with sentences that keep on giving long after your eye has sailed on

There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer, and in no book of his does he address his animating idea - The Only Way Not to Waste Time Is to Waste It - more overtly, urgently, emphatically and eloquently

Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain

I have read Geoff Dyer on World War I, jazz, photography, the Bienalle, and D. H. Lawrence, among many other subjects. It's as though his mind is slave to some unpredictable Internet browser inaccessible to the rest of us. His new book - an inimitably close study of life on an American aircraft carrier -is one of his best, funniest, and most humane yet. Geoff Dyer remains an unconventionally great writer - perhaps the most bafflingly great writer at work in the English language today

Geoff Dyer has managed to do again what he does best: insert himself into an exotic and demanding environment (sometimes, his own flat, but here, the violent wonders of an aircraft carrier) and file a report that mixes empathetic appreciation with dips into brilliant comic deflation. Welcome aboard the edifying and sometimes hilarious ship Dyer

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.5.2014
• Illustrationen: Chris Steele-Perkins
• Verlagsort: Edinburgh
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Militärfahrzeuge / -flugzeuge / -schiffe
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Schiffe
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 1-78211-335-5 / 1782113355
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78211-335-5 / 9781782113355