Another Great Day At Sea: On Board the USS George Bush: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush: 1 (Writers in Residence) - Softcover

Geoff Dyer; Chris Steele-Perkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0956569269 ISBN 13: 9780956569264

Publisher: Visual Editions, 2014

Synopsis

'We were on one of the most technologically advanced places on earth but the guys in grease-smeared brown sweatshirts and float coats, 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.' Geoff Dyer's incisive and witty voice depicts life on board the USS ship. His inventive descriptions are accompanied by photography by Chris Steele-Perkins, an award winning Magnum photographer.

This is the first title from Writers in Residence; a collectable set of books that bring together some of the greatest writers and photographers on the planet to reveal the normally faceless organizations that shape the modern world. The arresting, full-colour photography, depicting a subculture that is by turns surprising, hilarious, beautiful and insane, is by Chris Steele-Perkins, an award-winning Magnum photographer. Writers in Residence finds a third way between books and magazines, with every book in the set designed by Jeremy Leslie of magCulture.

Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable. Underlying Dyer's efforts to overcome the disadvantages of being the oldest, tallest (actually, second tallest), and most self-conscious person on the boat is an intense fascination with the military world. In recording daily life on board the ship, Dyer illuminates a society where discipline and conformity, dedication and optimism, become a form of self-expression.

Another Great Day at Sea is a dazzling social experiment, bringing readers behind the scenes of the world's largest aircraft carrier in a way that has never been seen before.

About this title

Review:

"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." --Steve Martin

'The notion of installing a writer of Dyer s baroquely sensitive and self-conscious temperament aboard an American aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf is obviously a stroke of genius... thoroughly enjoyable. The pleasure it delivers comes from two sources: Dyer s potent descriptive talent as he evokes the sequestered and sometimes surreal environment and society of the carrier, and the comedy he derives from his own fish-out-of-water status and high-strung personality.' - --Salon

'Geoff Dyer observes the privations and discipline of US warship life with a sharp eye... a sustained exercise in observation of which the lieutenant commander might be proud.... no writer has more fun with his own awkwardness, and in this respect you can't help feeling he has come to exactly the right place... A well-directed opening salvo in a new publishing venture.' - The Observer

'De Botton... knows that Dyer has a rare talent to take almost any topic... and imbue it with gravity and grace, tenderness and also tetchiness... Dyer fans will warm to his comic digressions on moustaches, deliriously sentimental reveries about what it might have been like to be a Battle of Britain pilot, semi-embarrassing stories about jokingly asking the carrier s gym boss where he might score steroids, and meditations on the similarities between writing and piloting a plane.' -Financial Times

'Dyer succeeds in rendering a very vivid impression of what life is like on an aircraft carrier. He is more assiduous than he lets on, providing the reader with all the most astounding statistics from each department.... quite unexpectedly from such a very teasing, very English writer, the book quickly transforms into a love-letter to the can-do optimism of America.' - 5 stars in Daily Mail

'One of the myriad joys of reading Dyer is his frankness about aspects of life that many writers don't share... The book is stuffed with wonderful anecdotes. And, of course, it wouldn't be Dyer if there wasn't the sharp self-awareness... A total delight.'- --The Independent

'Dyer himself can move from a viscerally detailed gripe about digestion and defecation to a cosmically awestruck rendering of the ship's passage through the universe, as seen through a borrowed pair of high-grade night-vision goggles: "a multitude of stars, unimaginably dense, more light than sky, more star than non-star". This speaks to the mysterious effect of all his best books, fiction and non-fiction. For such a worldly writer, Dyer often seems to verge on transcendence.' - Herald Scotland

A roundup of reviews for the book appeared in - --The Guardian

Book Description:

From a writer whose books succeed in either subverting or creating genres comes a unique look at an inaccessible world

About this edition

• Publisher: Visual Editions
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0956569269
• ISBN 13: 9780956569264
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 162