- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Adlard Coles Nautical; New edition edition (31 Jan 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0713659025
- ISBN-13: 978-0713659023
- Product Dimensions: 22.2 x 15 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,766,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
This volume records moments of both high drama and reflective calm aboard 17 ships the author has sailed in or owned, as well as other maritime adventures. Two of the boats include the beautiful brigantine "Albatros" and the "Butterfly", hardly more than a raft with patchwork sales.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
First published in 1968, 'Song of the Sirens' remains a maritime classic and an exceptionally enjoyable read today.
If a man, over his lifetime, has seventeen lovers and writes a book about them, then it is a work of obsession, passion and of no interest to anyone except his current lover. Unless the lovers are the seventeen 'Sirens', vessels ranging from the basic raft 'Butterfly' to the 117-ton brigantine Albatros, that become the lifelong passions of Ernest K.Gann, in which case they become a wonderfully crafted book of sailing and mans relationship with the sea.
As with Gann's other books, a rich web is woven of life, love, fate and consequence, that only adds to the salty wind blown blend of the 'Sirens' and their seductive gifts and rejections.
Highly recommended to any reader with an interest in the sea and all that sails on it.
With kindest regards
B'Booker
If a man, over his lifetime, has seventeen lovers and writes a book about them, then it is a work of obsession, passion and of no interest to anyone except his current lover. Unless the lovers are the seventeen 'Sirens', vessels ranging from the basic raft 'Butterfly' to the 117-ton brigantine Albatros, that become the lifelong passions of Ernest K.Gann, in which case they become a wonderfully crafted book of sailing and mans relationship with the sea.
As with Gann's other books, a rich web is woven of life, love, fate and consequence, that only adds to the salty wind blown blend of the 'Sirens' and their seductive gifts and rejections.
Highly recommended to any reader with an interest in the sea and all that sails on it.
With kindest regards
B'Booker
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
14 reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
When The Sirens Sing
19 April 2004
Format:Paperback
Ernest Gann has written a memoir of what happens when you hear the Sirens singing and follow them. I loved this book as the sea-going counterpart to his marvelous memoir of flight, Fate Is the Hunter; there's the same wrily witty, compassionate observations on the vicissitudes of the sea and those who sail upon it, particularly himself, the same amused humility in the face of the perversities and miracles of chance, whether they be a failing engine at the height of a tempest, intransigent bureaucrats of the Panama Canal, a balsa raft costing less than sixteen dollars which can leave a scientifically designed catamaran in its wake, or a wild voice singing in the Greek Islands. Whether recounting desperation in a great storm off the Oregon coast, or the nostalgic reminiscenses of his earlier sailing boats and shipmates, or the languid monotony of a long tropical ocean passage, or the nature and the workings of what he terms the 'Dock Committee' (which has membership worldwide), even the time he was masterfully conned by a crafty old sailor on the wharves of New York, Gann maintains a close and humorously affectionate eye on the sometimes clear, sometimes problematical, but always interesting relationships between the mundane acts of everyday and the greater universe which lurks behind every common act and thought.
Above all, there is in Sirens, as in all his books whether fic or nonfic, a love of the sea, of boats, of living fully in and of the world and of us frail, fallible and funny humans in it. In Fate Is the Hunter, it is the world of the air and those who fly; in Song of the Sirens, the sea. A wonderful read.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
A masterfully written true adventure.
18 Mar 2001
Format:Paperback
Ernest K. Gann is, quite simply, a great writer. In Song of the Sirens he writes about his adventures aboard the many ships he has owned. His writing skill takes the reader, even a landlubber like me, along with him to experience what it is like to ride out a storm 50 miles off the coast of Oregon in a fishing trawler or to sail across the Atlantic Ocean with an old, rusty, leaky training boat with a suspect engine. The book is slanted more for the boating afficionado. While he does explain some of the technical terms, a lot of them are obviously for someone who knows sailboats. There are no pictures, either. Pictures of the ships (not boats because, as he explains in the book, a boat is carried by a ship)would have been helpful. All in all, though, this book will greatly appeal to Ernest K. Gann fans, those who enjoy adventure stories, and those who enjoy sailing stories.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A witty, gripping account of Gann's adventures at sea.
1 Dec 1998
Format:Paperback
I'm a frequent reader of Gann's aviation fare but I was equally captivated by this account of his adventures at sea. I read this book when I was about 16 years old and was moved by Gann's vivid description of life on the ocean amid both fair weather and foul. Gann's love for the beauty and vagarities of ships and the sea permeates this fine novel.
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