The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

In the autumn of 1968,Donald Crowhurst set out from England in his untested trimaran,a competitor in the first singlehanded nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later,the boat was found in mid-Atlantic with no one on board. Crowhurst's logs and diaries revealed that,although he had radioed messages from his supposed round-the-world course,he had in fact never left the Atlantic. This journalistic masterpiece reconstructs what happened: Crowhurst's growing distrust of his boat; his first decision to attempt one of the great hoaxes of our time; the lying radio transmissions; the "triumphal" return up the Atlantic as the elapsed-time race leader; and the fantastic ending. The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is both a suspenseful narrative and a psychological casebook of human zeal and anguish.