Amazon.co.uk: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships: Bella Bathurst: Books

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Product Description

Daily Telegraph
'[Bathurst] is wry, perceptive, laconic, occasionally downright funny and uncannily skilled at recreating atmosphere...a pleasure to read'

Sunday Telegraph
'entertaining and gossipy...Bathurst pens vivid accounts of hazardous stretches of our coastline and the depredations of the inhabitants'

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Customer Reviews

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

Misleading Title, 10 Mar 2006

By	Matthew Jones (UK) - See all my reviews

This book has the dramatic title of "The Wreckers: A story of killing Seas, False lights and plundered ships". Perhaps it might also be titled "Repetitive tales of shipwrecks, plundered by locals". The book consists of a series of interviews with people involved with shipwrecks as far back as the 1930's, interspersed with accounts of shipwrecks dating back hundreds of years. Whilst the more recent accounts are a little dull, the historical accounts which seem a bit more exciting are understandably rather brief. The author tries valliantly to claim that ships were lured to their demise by false lights displayed from the shore, but can find little or no evidence for it. The Author previously wrote an account about the Lighthouse Stephensons and I suspect that this book is compiled from the bits she edited out of the previous book. Although it is reasonably interesting, it is repetitive and meandering, rather like a college disertation where the student hasn't got enough substance to write about, so strays off the subject and pads it out with irrelevant passages.

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

It isn't what it says on the cover!, 13 Jul 2006

By	A. G. Rimmer (Lancashire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships (Paperback)

I bought this book expecting to enjoy a riveting, well reschearched, story of the fabled wreckers of the British Isles. What I did get was, at best, an indifferent travelogue of parts of the UK shoreline and, at worst, a boring and totally irrelevent narrative about any subject other than wrecking. Not to be recommended unless you suffer from insomnia.

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Not Bad..., 28 Jul 2006

By	Karma (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships (Paperback)

I must admit I was hoping for a bit more from this book, it does attempt to cover the topic of Wrecking in Britain in some detail but I fear it is suffering (like so many books on a specific history subject) from a lack of material.

There is alot of padding and some blatantly off topic issues discussed such as Whales at the Natural History Museum!!

Unfortunately I think the book's problem is that Wrecking in the British Isles is simply not a subject large enough to warrant an entire book on it...perhaps if it was wrecking in the world at large perhaps it would make a more gripping read.

I did like the photographs and some of the stories about real wrecking incidents; Particularly the story of a young clergyman who, during a morning stroll on a beach, stumbled upon a shipwrecked sailor's corpse. He ran to find help and came across a cornishman out for a walk, he asked the man what he should do about the body and the cornishman replied 'Search his pockets' and walked off!

All in all it was fairly interesting but it had the potential to be alot better had it covered a broader subject.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Disappointing.
Could have been such a great book (in theory), butthe author has just got together a collection of details and made them into a book.

Published 3 months ago by Ackman3

No wind in the sails
Its seductive sub-title of 'A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships' gives the impression that 'The Wreckers' will be a book which throws a torch-beam upon the... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Wildlife Bookworm

Outstanding
Drenched in the salt folklore of an island nation, Bathurst's book is a tour de force. Her research is faultless and exhaustive, and shows that the era of the "wrecker" has not... Read more

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Beautiful and Vivid
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