IYRS|MoY Book Club

The IYRS/MoY Library is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a book club. It will be a very informal gathering for students, staff, supporters and anyone interested in reading salty yarns and discussing them among fellow sailors and boat lovers. The first book we'll be reading is A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols. It is the very well received and well reviewed account of the 1968 "Golden Globe" race, a single-handed, solo, non-stop race around the world where nine sailors left England in small sailboats navigating by sextant and paper chart to accomplish what many considered the ultimate test and only one finished the race.

Elizabeth Hightower wrote in her review for The New York Times, "Few writers are more suited to tell these men's story than Peter Nichols. It takes a solo sailor to convey so vividly what no Internet dispatch can: the unmoored passage of time and space while sailors are alone at sea. 'When they head out upon the deep,' Nichols writes, 'the constructs of society soon drop astern and they are surrounded by shooting stars overhead, phosphorescence in their wakes and heaving shapes all around them in the sea and sky.' So what possesses such people? This is what interests Nichols: 'Part of the attraction of these loners,' he writes, 'is that they invariably look and sound normal: they look like us. They're usually modest when asked how they survived their terrible ordeals, they readily admit their fear, and in so doing they fool the rest of us into thinking that they are like us -- or more accurately, that we could be like them.' It takes a sympathetic guide like Nichols to show us, to the extent that anyone really can, what it is like to attempt such a monumental feat alone. But in the end what drives them remains a lovely mystery. As Bernard Moitessier wrote in his log: 'You do not ask a tame sea gull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all.'

New Update: Nichols himself has graciously reached out and offered to take part by answering questions via Skype. This is a wonderful opportunity to have access to Nichols, also the author of Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat, a memoir, and the novel Voyage to the North Star.

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols is a timely choice because of its current relevancy as the Volvo Ocean Race is now underway. Subsequent book choices will be voted on by participants. A Voyage for Madmen is readily available in paperback as well as electronically for Kindle and iPad. The first book club gathering will convene in the IYRS/MoY Library on the 4th floor of the Aquidneck Mill building on Thursday, February 9th at 7pm. Please RSVP to Jay Picotte at jpicotte@moy.org.