Dark Wind

Dark Wind is much more than one man's story of a disastrous sailing trip that cost the life of his lover, though its blow-by-blow narrative of the typhoon that wrecked their ship and swept them into the sea is reason enough to read his searing memoir. What distinguishes Gordon Chaplin's book from others of its kind is its stripped-down prose, its unsentimental depiction of a passionate but less-than-perfect romance, and its bleak acceptance of the fact that "actions have consequences"--in this case, fatal ones. Chaplin and Susan Atkinson met when she was married to his college roommate. Their shared love of adventure was soon apparent when, on a sail with their then respective spouses, the two argued for outrunning a storm that their partners wanted to avoid by returning to shore. When they got together 12 years later, her marriage had failed and the affair blew his apart. Risk taking was one of the foundations of their relationship, but it always came harder to Atkinson than to Chaplin, and in the end it undid them. Real failure is the crux of this memoir, and it's both terrifying and oddly liberating to read this scarifying account by a writer who honestly admits to being "someone whose best wasn't good enough." --Wendy Smith