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The Last Ship
The unimaginable has happened. The world has been plunged into all-out nuclear war. Sailing near the Arctic Circle, the U.S.S. Nathan James is relatively unscathed, but the future is grim and Captain Thomas is facing mutiny from the tattered remnants of his crew. With civilization in ruins, he urges those that remain—one-hundred-and-fifty-two men and twenty-six women—to pull together in search of land. Once they reach safety, however, the men and women on board realize that they are earth's last remaining survivors—and they've all been exposed to radiation. When none of the women seems able to conceive, fear sets in. Will this be the end of humankind?
614 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
721 people are currently reading
6986 people want to read
About the author
William Brinkley
30 books42 followersWilliam Clark "Bill" Brinkley was an American writer and journalist.
Brinkley is perhaps best known for his 1988 novel, The Last Ship, and his 1956 novel, Don't Go Near the Water, which was later adapted to film in 1957 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Don't Go Near the Water.
Brinkley was born in Custer City, Oklahoma on September 10, 1917, the youngest of five children and the son of a minister. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1940.Brinkley was an officer in the United States Navy during World War II, where he served in Europe and the Pacific, primarily in public relations duties.
After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1940, Brinkley went on to work for The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Afterwards, Brinkley was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1941 to 1942 and from 1949 to 1951. He was also a staff writer, correspondent and assistant editor and for Life magazine from 1951 to 1958. Brinkley was also a member of the National Press Club until his death in 1993.
In 1948, after his tenure as an officer in the United States Navy during World War II, Brinkley wrote and published his first novel, Quicksand, in 1948.
In 1954, Brinkley wrote his only non-fiction book, The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia, a biography of a Slovakian nun based her memoirs as recited to him. In 1956, he went on to write the best-selling novel and perhaps his most prominent work, Don't Go Near the Water, a comedy about United States Navy sailors serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Don't Go Near the Water would later be adapted into film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Don't Go Near the Water.
In 1961, Brinkley wrote and published The Fun House, a comedy novel set in the offices of a picture magazine, similar to that of Life. The following year, in 1962, Brinkley wrote and published the novel, The Two Susans, which was followed in 1966 by The Ninety and Nine, a novel detailing life on board a United States Navy LST during World War II.
In 1971, Brinkley moved to McAllen, Texas and would live there until his death in 1993. Throughout the 1970s, Brinkley only wrote one novel, Breakpoint, a novel about tennis, published in 1978.
Brinkley's 1978 novel about tennis, Breakpoint, was followed by Peeper, a comedy novel about a voyeur in the small Texas town of Martha, Texas, near the Rio Grande river. In March 1988, Brinkley wrote and published his last work, The Last Ship, a post-apocalyptic fiction novel dealing with the sailors of the USS Nathan James (DDG-80), a fictional United States Navy guided missile destroyer, which survives a brief, but full-scale global nuclear war, primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union.
After suffering from a major depressive disorder for over several years, Brinkley committed suicide at the age of 76 from an overdose of barbiturates on November 22, 1993. He died at his home in McAllen, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico.
Brinkley is perhaps best known for his 1988 novel, The Last Ship, and his 1956 novel, Don't Go Near the Water, which was later adapted to film in 1957 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Don't Go Near the Water.
Brinkley was born in Custer City, Oklahoma on September 10, 1917, the youngest of five children and the son of a minister. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1940.Brinkley was an officer in the United States Navy during World War II, where he served in Europe and the Pacific, primarily in public relations duties.
After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1940, Brinkley went on to work for The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Afterwards, Brinkley was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1941 to 1942 and from 1949 to 1951. He was also a staff writer, correspondent and assistant editor and for Life magazine from 1951 to 1958. Brinkley was also a member of the National Press Club until his death in 1993.
In 1948, after his tenure as an officer in the United States Navy during World War II, Brinkley wrote and published his first novel, Quicksand, in 1948.
In 1954, Brinkley wrote his only non-fiction book, The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia, a biography of a Slovakian nun based her memoirs as recited to him. In 1956, he went on to write the best-selling novel and perhaps his most prominent work, Don't Go Near the Water, a comedy about United States Navy sailors serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Don't Go Near the Water would later be adapted into film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Don't Go Near the Water.
In 1961, Brinkley wrote and published The Fun House, a comedy novel set in the offices of a picture magazine, similar to that of Life. The following year, in 1962, Brinkley wrote and published the novel, The Two Susans, which was followed in 1966 by The Ninety and Nine, a novel detailing life on board a United States Navy LST during World War II.
In 1971, Brinkley moved to McAllen, Texas and would live there until his death in 1993. Throughout the 1970s, Brinkley only wrote one novel, Breakpoint, a novel about tennis, published in 1978.
Brinkley's 1978 novel about tennis, Breakpoint, was followed by Peeper, a comedy novel about a voyeur in the small Texas town of Martha, Texas, near the Rio Grande river. In March 1988, Brinkley wrote and published his last work, The Last Ship, a post-apocalyptic fiction novel dealing with the sailors of the USS Nathan James (DDG-80), a fictional United States Navy guided missile destroyer, which survives a brief, but full-scale global nuclear war, primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union.
After suffering from a major depressive disorder for over several years, Brinkley committed suicide at the age of 76 from an overdose of barbiturates on November 22, 1993. He died at his home in McAllen, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico.
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July 28, 2023
“A deafening sound shattered the air as the first Tomahawk emerged from its cell, ascended out of its pool of fire the width of the ship and forty feet high into the radiance fashioned by the cold delicate sunlight of the high latitudes and moved upward over the impassive waters of the Barents into the chaste heavens, its spiraling tail stretching quickly a mile or more high from the ship to itself and topped with its ornament of bright white fire against the satin blue. Then from both launchers a vast eruption, eleven more missiles departing their cells in immense fiery bursts. I followed each with my naked eye until it had disappeared out of my sight and beyond the horizon. I looked at my watch. From first message to execution it had taken just under twenty-four minutes. It was as good as we had ever done in dummy runs…”
- William Brinkley, The Last Ship
The journalist Ron Rosenbaum claims to have coined the term “nuke porn” in a 1970 article for Harper’s called The Subterranean World of the Bomb. In his 2011 book on nuclear war, How the End Begins, he uses the phrase incessantly to describe just about every artistic rendering of nuclear warfare, from Dr. Strangelove on down. Perhaps enamored with his own perceived cleverness, Rosenbaum tends to lump together all atomic-adjacent media with this pejorative, with the result that sobering films like The Day After and mournful novels like On the Beach get reduced to crass, exploitative entertainments, which they are not.
I thought about the term as I read William Brinkley’s The Last Ship.
Because The Last Ship is nuke porn.
In fact – and by way of gentle warning – it nearly veers over the line into actual “porn,” as the word is used in its more familiar sense.
The Last Ship is a strange brew. Two-thirds of it is ponderous portentousness; and one-third is terrible erotic fiction. Taken together, it’s one of the weirder hybrids I’ve read. This makes it impossible to recommend, and at the same time, impossible for me to hate.
There is something almost audacious in the scope of its intent and ambition. There is definitely something a bit flawed in its execution.
***
Given that it’s in the book description, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that The Last Ship takes place in the context of a just-fought nuclear war. But if you absolutely don’t want to know anything more, please skip this section.
Still here?
The story is simple enough, as tends to be the case in post-apocalyptic fiction.
The guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Nathan James is on patrol in the Barents Sea when she is given the order to launch her nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at the Soviet city of Orel. Without a moment’s reflection – and all the more chilling for it – the Nathan James carries out her mission, launches her missiles, and then flees to the North Sea.
Suddenly, communication with U.S. Navy Command is interrupted. The Nathan James is unable to contact the outside world. A trip up the Thames to a smoke-shrouded London gives good indication that World War III has begun and ended. For reasons that are unexplained – and strangely unexplored – the Nathan James alone has survived.
The journey that follows is a harrowing evocation of a bomb-blasted and irradiated world. A ruined Gibraltar. Poisoned survivors all along the Amalfi Coast. A yacht turned into a ship of ghosts by a neutron bomb. The long, cold, dark journey through a nuclear winter. This is a novel with a particular skill for creating ghastly and lasting images. It’s at its best when simply observing the altered universe beyond the decks of the ship.
***
Along with the global catastrophe, the ship’s crew faces myriad other obstacles from the obvious (supply shortages; existential despair) to the melodramatic (the threat of mutiny; a serial killer). In a plotline ripped shamelessly from Neville Shute’s On the Beach, the Nathan James is able to pick up an ambiguous message from National Command Authority, giving some hope that parts of the United States are still habitable. There’s also a Soviet submarine shadowing them.
Oh, and did I mention the women?
The Nathan James has a mixed crew of 152 men and 26 women. This fact is mentioned early and often, as though we don’t all know where this is going. That’s right: this is a novel that not only imagines the end of mankind, but also how it might begin anew.
***
The chief factor in enjoying or hating The Last Ship is your ability to go along with Brinkley’s writing style. This is a heavily stylized book that defines the term “overwritten.” Often, the intrigues of the plot are obscured by Brinkley’s prose, which is filled with allusion, metaphor, and boldly purple, near laugh-out-loud sentences. There are moments when this seems reverse-engineered from an ornate Victorian novel.
If that seems horrible, let me sell it to you this way: What if Tom Clancy and Charles Dickens teamed up to write a techno-thriller? It would turn out like The Last Ship.
Having always prided myself on my vocabulary, the sesquipedalian nature of The Last Ship had me wondering if Brinkley was picking words from an old ACT study guide. For example, Brinkley not only uses the word flocculent to describe the clouds, but does so on multiple occasions.
At times the verbose posturing almost feels parodic. The Last Ship is like a plutonium, deuterium, and tritium-injected version of Moby Dick. Same references to literature, the classics, and the Bible. Same endless philosophizing. Same mystical belief in the power of the sea. In case the similarities are not enough, Brinkley helpfully includes a character named Melville.
***
The Last Ship is narrated in the first-person by the ship’s captain. As a rule, I don’t like first-person novels, and I say this with full understanding that many of the world’s great stories are told this way. The style is simply too constricting for my taste. An author goes to great lengths to create a fictional world, and then he or she makes you look at it through a single pair of eyes. It’s almost frustrating.
That is especially the case here. The aftermath of a cataclysmic nuclear war is bound to engender a diversity of feeling. But in The Last Ship, we only get one perspective. And that perspective is of the singularly incurious and emotionally flat captain. This is a guy who will ruminate on the ocean for pages, but never gives a fully formed thought about what caused the all-out exchange of nukes in the first place. He is entirely uninterested in going back to America, and is puzzlingly indifferent to the possible destruction of everything he ever knew, of every place he ever went, of every person he ever met.
***
We should probably talk about the sex. You might want to look away.
In fact, I’m going to hide the next paragraphs out of a finely honed sense of decency.
***
I’m still not sure if I’m being way too hard on The Last Ship or way too easy. There are so many things about it that feel objectively bad. Still, I can’t deny the fact that I absolutely enjoyed the heck out of it. Sometimes my enjoyment stemmed from Brinkley’s preposterous literary posturing. At other times, though, it derived from the power of his vision. He writes some pretty bad sex; he also delivers some darn good set-pieces.
Post-apocalyptic fiction is a robust but slightly disreputable sub-genre. Part of the reason we read it is to catch a glimpse of the great train-wreck of fallen humanity. Some part of our lizard brain wants to see how the world would look after it has blown itself up. There is also something deeper at work. An exploration of the profound frailty of civilization, built as it is upon the profound frailties of humans. For all its excesses, this is something that Brinkley takes seriously, and it is a minor tragedy that he did not live long enough to complete the sequel.
- William Brinkley, The Last Ship
The journalist Ron Rosenbaum claims to have coined the term “nuke porn” in a 1970 article for Harper’s called The Subterranean World of the Bomb. In his 2011 book on nuclear war, How the End Begins, he uses the phrase incessantly to describe just about every artistic rendering of nuclear warfare, from Dr. Strangelove on down. Perhaps enamored with his own perceived cleverness, Rosenbaum tends to lump together all atomic-adjacent media with this pejorative, with the result that sobering films like The Day After and mournful novels like On the Beach get reduced to crass, exploitative entertainments, which they are not.
I thought about the term as I read William Brinkley’s The Last Ship.
Because The Last Ship is nuke porn.
In fact – and by way of gentle warning – it nearly veers over the line into actual “porn,” as the word is used in its more familiar sense.
The Last Ship is a strange brew. Two-thirds of it is ponderous portentousness; and one-third is terrible erotic fiction. Taken together, it’s one of the weirder hybrids I’ve read. This makes it impossible to recommend, and at the same time, impossible for me to hate.
There is something almost audacious in the scope of its intent and ambition. There is definitely something a bit flawed in its execution.
***
Given that it’s in the book description, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that The Last Ship takes place in the context of a just-fought nuclear war. But if you absolutely don’t want to know anything more, please skip this section.
Still here?
The story is simple enough, as tends to be the case in post-apocalyptic fiction.
The guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Nathan James is on patrol in the Barents Sea when she is given the order to launch her nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at the Soviet city of Orel. Without a moment’s reflection – and all the more chilling for it – the Nathan James carries out her mission, launches her missiles, and then flees to the North Sea.
Suddenly, communication with U.S. Navy Command is interrupted. The Nathan James is unable to contact the outside world. A trip up the Thames to a smoke-shrouded London gives good indication that World War III has begun and ended. For reasons that are unexplained – and strangely unexplored – the Nathan James alone has survived.
The journey that follows is a harrowing evocation of a bomb-blasted and irradiated world. A ruined Gibraltar. Poisoned survivors all along the Amalfi Coast. A yacht turned into a ship of ghosts by a neutron bomb. The long, cold, dark journey through a nuclear winter. This is a novel with a particular skill for creating ghastly and lasting images. It’s at its best when simply observing the altered universe beyond the decks of the ship.
***
Along with the global catastrophe, the ship’s crew faces myriad other obstacles from the obvious (supply shortages; existential despair) to the melodramatic (the threat of mutiny; a serial killer). In a plotline ripped shamelessly from Neville Shute’s On the Beach, the Nathan James is able to pick up an ambiguous message from National Command Authority, giving some hope that parts of the United States are still habitable. There’s also a Soviet submarine shadowing them.
Oh, and did I mention the women?
The Nathan James has a mixed crew of 152 men and 26 women. This fact is mentioned early and often, as though we don’t all know where this is going. That’s right: this is a novel that not only imagines the end of mankind, but also how it might begin anew.
***
The chief factor in enjoying or hating The Last Ship is your ability to go along with Brinkley’s writing style. This is a heavily stylized book that defines the term “overwritten.” Often, the intrigues of the plot are obscured by Brinkley’s prose, which is filled with allusion, metaphor, and boldly purple, near laugh-out-loud sentences. There are moments when this seems reverse-engineered from an ornate Victorian novel.
If that seems horrible, let me sell it to you this way: What if Tom Clancy and Charles Dickens teamed up to write a techno-thriller? It would turn out like The Last Ship.
Having always prided myself on my vocabulary, the sesquipedalian nature of The Last Ship had me wondering if Brinkley was picking words from an old ACT study guide. For example, Brinkley not only uses the word flocculent to describe the clouds, but does so on multiple occasions.
At times the verbose posturing almost feels parodic. The Last Ship is like a plutonium, deuterium, and tritium-injected version of Moby Dick. Same references to literature, the classics, and the Bible. Same endless philosophizing. Same mystical belief in the power of the sea. In case the similarities are not enough, Brinkley helpfully includes a character named Melville.
***
The Last Ship is narrated in the first-person by the ship’s captain. As a rule, I don’t like first-person novels, and I say this with full understanding that many of the world’s great stories are told this way. The style is simply too constricting for my taste. An author goes to great lengths to create a fictional world, and then he or she makes you look at it through a single pair of eyes. It’s almost frustrating.
That is especially the case here. The aftermath of a cataclysmic nuclear war is bound to engender a diversity of feeling. But in The Last Ship, we only get one perspective. And that perspective is of the singularly incurious and emotionally flat captain. This is a guy who will ruminate on the ocean for pages, but never gives a fully formed thought about what caused the all-out exchange of nukes in the first place. He is entirely uninterested in going back to America, and is puzzlingly indifferent to the possible destruction of everything he ever knew, of every place he ever went, of every person he ever met.
***
We should probably talk about the sex. You might want to look away.
In fact, I’m going to hide the next paragraphs out of a finely honed sense of decency.
***
I’m still not sure if I’m being way too hard on The Last Ship or way too easy. There are so many things about it that feel objectively bad. Still, I can’t deny the fact that I absolutely enjoyed the heck out of it. Sometimes my enjoyment stemmed from Brinkley’s preposterous literary posturing. At other times, though, it derived from the power of his vision. He writes some pretty bad sex; he also delivers some darn good set-pieces.
Post-apocalyptic fiction is a robust but slightly disreputable sub-genre. Part of the reason we read it is to catch a glimpse of the great train-wreck of fallen humanity. Some part of our lizard brain wants to see how the world would look after it has blown itself up. There is also something deeper at work. An exploration of the profound frailty of civilization, built as it is upon the profound frailties of humans. For all its excesses, this is something that Brinkley takes seriously, and it is a minor tragedy that he did not live long enough to complete the sequel.
September 18, 2025
The end of civilization not a new concept to be sure , still books continue to be written until infinity it seems. The difference this one is onboard a U.S. Navy vessel on Earth, check that the Arctic Sea, the destroyer Nathan James the most deadly armed craft anywhere with 56 nuclear Tomahawk missiles in existence which will soon be a misnomer and other assortments of weapons too numerous to state, over kill would not be incorrect. Captain Thomas takes his job seriously, a long career in the waves he feels more at ease there than land. Still time moves and women have arrived though first skeptical he soon starts accepting and surprise, enjoys the company. Especially pretty Lieutenant Girard in the pilot house with him she looks better than the other officers he sees . Rather shy with females in his early forties finds talking with Lieutenant Girard fun, she is an able, naval officer too, that makes the bachelor captain eyes turn away from the blue waters towards her, occupied with other navy men, the view inside very different with Lt. GERARD near. The commands finally come, the fear also, let the tomahawks fly were else to Russia, nobody knows how the war began but it doesn't matter now the results the same total destruction. SEEKING ANSWERS the crew in the Mediterranean Sea go to shore
not a good idea the few creatures walking on the beach were once human, shock grips the sailors, quickly returning to the ship .The radioactive winds flow and fall around the world the results not good...However some in the crew need answers an idea strikes, naive sailors must go home and see their families...what really happened or mutiny will occur, yet hope is eternal. Knowledge from an officer, Lt. Selmon ... find a new place to live free from the lethal, toxic air if possible but where? The South Seas far from the dead continents and pray there is an island paradise maybe not a blue lagoon but acceptable. The narrative loses steam at the middle and the author is quite long winded however the premise is unique besides it gets kinky at the end. Too many men not enough women. A voyage with rough passages both on the seas and terra firma but smooth sailing for most passengers, flawed still a thought provoking novel.
not a good idea the few creatures walking on the beach were once human, shock grips the sailors, quickly returning to the ship .The radioactive winds flow and fall around the world the results not good...However some in the crew need answers an idea strikes, naive sailors must go home and see their families...what really happened or mutiny will occur, yet hope is eternal. Knowledge from an officer, Lt. Selmon ... find a new place to live free from the lethal, toxic air if possible but where? The South Seas far from the dead continents and pray there is an island paradise maybe not a blue lagoon but acceptable. The narrative loses steam at the middle and the author is quite long winded however the premise is unique besides it gets kinky at the end. Too many men not enough women. A voyage with rough passages both on the seas and terra firma but smooth sailing for most passengers, flawed still a thought provoking novel.
March 31, 2015
I have read many reviews by other readers of The Last Ship over the years and each of them stated the same thing... I loved the plot and persevered to the end in spite of the authors writing style. And just like so many before me, once I finished this book I too threw it against the wall and shouted, HA! This book did not beat me!
This is a doomsday story about the last American war ship desperately searching for safe harbor in an irradiated and burned world. It's also a morality tale about how to carry on the human race when the ratio of men to women isn't balanced. It's a phenomenal post-apocalyptic tale with great imagery and drama. A true must read for all fans of the P.A. genera.
However, I must seriously caution any reader to take heed before embarking on this bleak yet imaginative seafaring journey. First and foremost I must say that Brinkley was truly ambitious in his attempt at writing a very modern story in the voice of a very old world sea captain. At times his prose was brilliant and satisfying. Unfortunately, at other times his incessant attempt at being "literary" nearly drowned me in a sea of words. He liberally doused each page with nautical jargon, habitually digressed via flashback, lacked the ability to form a paragraph and produced impressive run on sentences. At times I found myself backtracking to re-read whole chapters in order to maintain a grasp of where and when I was in the story. Quite simply, his writing style was frustrating. One could safely say that his editor deserved to be keelhauled.
In spite of his writing style (or perhaps because of it) you should persevere. The story is that intriguing. But you have to want to read this book in order to make it to the last page. And if you do... you will be one of the few, the proud and the brave.
This is a doomsday story about the last American war ship desperately searching for safe harbor in an irradiated and burned world. It's also a morality tale about how to carry on the human race when the ratio of men to women isn't balanced. It's a phenomenal post-apocalyptic tale with great imagery and drama. A true must read for all fans of the P.A. genera.
However, I must seriously caution any reader to take heed before embarking on this bleak yet imaginative seafaring journey. First and foremost I must say that Brinkley was truly ambitious in his attempt at writing a very modern story in the voice of a very old world sea captain. At times his prose was brilliant and satisfying. Unfortunately, at other times his incessant attempt at being "literary" nearly drowned me in a sea of words. He liberally doused each page with nautical jargon, habitually digressed via flashback, lacked the ability to form a paragraph and produced impressive run on sentences. At times I found myself backtracking to re-read whole chapters in order to maintain a grasp of where and when I was in the story. Quite simply, his writing style was frustrating. One could safely say that his editor deserved to be keelhauled.
In spite of his writing style (or perhaps because of it) you should persevere. The story is that intriguing. But you have to want to read this book in order to make it to the last page. And if you do... you will be one of the few, the proud and the brave.
February 4, 2018
(Original review date: 3 October 2013)
Soooooo, this book is a piece of shit! And not your garden-variety piece of shit, either, but a vomitous clusterfuck of truly offensive, misogynistic garbage.
I stuck it out for a hundred pages, and here's what I can tell you about the plot:
The narrator is the captain of a US Navy Destroyer. There has been a nuclear war; they are, as far as they know, the Last Ship. Like, in the world. The crew numbers 250 men and 32 women. And you may be thinking - wow, if this is the last of humanity, it sure is a good thing there are women aboard! You know, for repopulating, saving-the-species sorts of activities, right?
That's what I was thinking, at least. But oh my goodness, NOPE. Logic of that kind will get you nowhere in this book.
Let us begin, shall we, with some quotes from Chapter Two:
Note: the preceding monster paragraph consists of exactly TWO (2) sentences. Content is not the only problem with this shitshow.
This monologue then goes on to speculate that the sea itself will rise up in wrath and destroy any ships which include women, because... you know. Nature hates the ladies.
(In case you're wondering, I did check the copyright date after reading this - it was published in 1989. Not 1950. Not 1850.)
You, sir, are an officer AND a gentleman!! (Protip: Using the word "female" as a noun to refer to humans is an automatic FAIL.)
HA HA HA FUCK YOU.
But enough about the ladies. Skipping ahead...
Holy shit no, okay, MOVING ALONG.
YOU DON'T SAY! Seems to me like maybe a person who has never meaningfully interacted with a member of the opposite sex in his life may not have the leadership skills to be promoted to CAPTAIN OF A SHIP. But what do I know, I am not a military genius.
So... yeah. Chapter Two, my friends.
The story then moves on as they discover an apparently uncontaminated island and go about starting to farm the land, harvest fish, and gauge their likelihood of long-term survival. But it doesn't take long for the icky specter of ladyhood to again rise up and terrorize our Captain.
Taking a walk around the island, he stumbles upon a pair of sailors, a man and a woman, talking and giggling by a stream...
I have no idea why this possibly-romantic-but-totally-innocent scene terrifies him so profoundly. It'd be one thing, I suppose, if the company were actively fighting a war - fraternization can complicate things and all that. BUT THEY ARE THE LAST HUMAN BEINGS ON THE PLANET. If no couples get all googly-eyed by a creekbed at some point, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANY MORE HUMAN BEINGS. What the fuck, Captain. What the fuck.
But never fear, it gets a whole lot worse. Later that night, the morale officer, a woman, comes to his cabin to give her daily report. They banter for a bit, which he seems to enjoy until he catches himself enjoying it, at which point he quickly re-adopts his douchey demeanor. Finally, he gets to the point that's been bothering him: "How are the women doing, Lieutenant?" Taken aback, she tells him they're doing as well as the men are doing, and that "the women will be all right, Captain." This answer, for some reason, pushes him right the fuck over the edge. Hold on to your hats for this batshittery, folks...
Et fucking CETERA. Holy shit, buddy. HOLY SHIT.
They discuss the topic some more, the Captain barely reining in his terror and fury; she confides that the women feel "outnumbered" (I DO NOT BLAME THEM!) which of course further fuels his paranoid delusions. Finally, she gets up to leave, and he spouts what may be the creepiest narration I've read all year:
And it just goes ON, this menacing mix of lust and violence, terror and fury. And all because... women exist? On the ship? WHAT THE FUCK.
I read apocalyptic books because I am interested in stories about the end of the world - destruction, social breakdown, isolation, disaster. I do not read apocalyptic books to get inside the head of a horrifying misogynist. I don't want to feel angry and afraid when reading for leisure. And I don't know what Brinkley's intent is here - if he is using the Captain as a mouthpiece for his own views, or if he is crafting a character study on the mindset of this particular brand of monster. Maybe the Captain will be redeemed, maybe he will be destroyed, maybe his dreadfulness will serve some yet-to-be-seen literary purpose.
But I don't actually give a fuck, because I'm not reading another 500 pages of this long-winded, disgusting diatribe. I just don't have the energy. 100 pages in and not a single DETAIL on what actually ended the world? FUCK this book.
Soooooo, this book is a piece of shit! And not your garden-variety piece of shit, either, but a vomitous clusterfuck of truly offensive, misogynistic garbage.
I stuck it out for a hundred pages, and here's what I can tell you about the plot:
The narrator is the captain of a US Navy Destroyer. There has been a nuclear war; they are, as far as they know, the Last Ship. Like, in the world. The crew numbers 250 men and 32 women. And you may be thinking - wow, if this is the last of humanity, it sure is a good thing there are women aboard! You know, for repopulating, saving-the-species sorts of activities, right?
That's what I was thinking, at least. But oh my goodness, NOPE. Logic of that kind will get you nowhere in this book.
Let us begin, shall we, with some quotes from Chapter Two:
When the Navy not long ago first commenced assigning a few women to ships, I felt it had to be one of those incalculable fundamental errors that seem to be made only by civilizations in decline, a lapse profound and past comprehension in most elementary morality and judgment. The idea that we should take these embodiments - harbors, repositories - of all that is gentle and of final value in life, and God and Nature's chosen instrument for the species' very survival, and place them where they would be caught up in the ancient rough-and-tumble of shipboard existence, where peril was one's daily bread, indeed where they might be maimed or slaughtered, and this act based on the concept that equality consisted in women doing exactly what men do: this seemed to me wicked to the point of malignancy, an abomination in the sight of the Lord and of pure reason, and a consummate fraud pulled off on half the human race by their own kind, abetted by a number of men masquerading as their champions.
Note: the preceding monster paragraph consists of exactly TWO (2) sentences. Content is not the only problem with this shitshow.
This monologue then goes on to speculate that the sea itself will rise up in wrath and destroy any ships which include women, because... you know. Nature hates the ladies.
(In case you're wondering, I did check the copyright date after reading this - it was published in 1989. Not 1950. Not 1850.)
However, since the deed was struck, I treated females, once they began to come aboard the Nathan James, exactly as I did the men and officers. If equality was what they wanted, equality I would give them. I was not prepared further to insult them by setting for them standards lower than those I enjoined on my other sailors.
You, sir, are an officer AND a gentleman!! (Protip: Using the word "female" as a noun to refer to humans is an automatic FAIL.)
She was by now Navy as much as any man. I was suddenly aware, watching her on the ladder, that she had mastered with seeming ease something I had felt, since these matters began, to be among the most difficult of feats: at once to be a Navy officer and remain a woman.
HA HA HA FUCK YOU.
But enough about the ladies. Skipping ahead...
He possessed that Jewishness which is quietly confident of its superiority of intellect, by the same token far too smart to let his knowledge of that fact show through, realizing that to do so throws away half its power...
Holy shit no, okay, MOVING ALONG.
Just because I had spent virtually my entire adult life at sea, I had known few women at all. If the word "known" be enlarged to mean the inner workings of another human being, the inner life, one could come very close to saying I had known none whatsoever. For all purposes I knew nothing about women.
YOU DON'T SAY! Seems to me like maybe a person who has never meaningfully interacted with a member of the opposite sex in his life may not have the leadership skills to be promoted to CAPTAIN OF A SHIP. But what do I know, I am not a military genius.
So... yeah. Chapter Two, my friends.
The story then moves on as they discover an apparently uncontaminated island and go about starting to farm the land, harvest fish, and gauge their likelihood of long-term survival. But it doesn't take long for the icky specter of ladyhood to again rise up and terrorize our Captain.
Taking a walk around the island, he stumbles upon a pair of sailors, a man and a woman, talking and giggling by a stream...
Regarded one way, it was a charming tableau, a girl and a boy kneeling at a brook, their faces wet from the tasting of it...Nothing whatsoever happened. But there was a quality in the scene itself, in the very configurations of their facing genuflected forms, a sense of something like intimacy that made something terrible strike at my heart. I moved quickly on, wanting to get away from it.
I have no idea why this possibly-romantic-but-totally-innocent scene terrifies him so profoundly. It'd be one thing, I suppose, if the company were actively fighting a war - fraternization can complicate things and all that. BUT THEY ARE THE LAST HUMAN BEINGS ON THE PLANET. If no couples get all googly-eyed by a creekbed at some point, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANY MORE HUMAN BEINGS. What the fuck, Captain. What the fuck.
But never fear, it gets a whole lot worse. Later that night, the morale officer, a woman, comes to his cabin to give her daily report. They banter for a bit, which he seems to enjoy until he catches himself enjoying it, at which point he quickly re-adopts his douchey demeanor. Finally, he gets to the point that's been bothering him: "How are the women doing, Lieutenant?" Taken aback, she tells him they're doing as well as the men are doing, and that "the women will be all right, Captain." This answer, for some reason, pushes him right the fuck over the edge. Hold on to your hats for this batshittery, folks...
This statement increased a kind of angry wariness I could feel as having appeared within myself, bringing with it suddenly a sense of danger lying just below the surface, something about it infinitely threatening. Apart from having the highest rank, she was a natural leader of the women. The women in their rigorously segregated quarters must talk over any number of things. There was nothing to keep them from talking over anything, and no man's ear ever hearing. It was not inconceivable that they might, in present circumstances, come to consider their first allegiance to themselves, to their own fraternity [sic] of womanhood. The very idea of the possible existence of such an entity, never having remotely occurred to me until this instant, was itself deeply unsettling, further, wholly inadmissible. Not only can it not be recognized, given any official standing whatsoever; nothing is more expressly, categorically forbidden aboard ship than cliques of any kind. And I could think of none more unacceptable, striking at the very functioning of the ship, than one consisting only of women; I would come down on it instantly, ruthlessly, with every force and power I possessed...
Et fucking CETERA. Holy shit, buddy. HOLY SHIT.
They discuss the topic some more, the Captain barely reining in his terror and fury; she confides that the women feel "outnumbered" (I DO NOT BLAME THEM!) which of course further fuels his paranoid delusions. Finally, she gets up to leave, and he spouts what may be the creepiest narration I've read all year:
She walked to the door, taking her inviolate serenity - and, it seemed, her sureness of something undefined - with her. Her body and her way of carrying it were pliant and without effort, eurythmic, a grace by second nature, as though it were something she never had to give a thought to; impossible of making an awkward movement. I could see the shimmering water of the lagoon beyond, seeming to backdrop, and to outline, her woman's figure. But I was not looking at the lagoon. I was looking first at the back of her head and the pure grain of wheat-light hair, then all down her body, slender and cool, across her seat, down her legs, the clean white smartness of the uniform seeming to enhance as it were her womanhood; whilst I did, having the eerie conviction that she knew I was doing so. Then she was gone and I sat looking out at only the unobstructed lagoon. Feeling a tremor through all my being, a dampness breaking out all over me as from a fever. In this male stronghold of ships I felt suddenly enveloped in femininity, in its impenetrable mysteries, its unknown and perhaps unknowable secrets - its snares, its traps.
And it just goes ON, this menacing mix of lust and violence, terror and fury. And all because... women exist? On the ship? WHAT THE FUCK.
I read apocalyptic books because I am interested in stories about the end of the world - destruction, social breakdown, isolation, disaster. I do not read apocalyptic books to get inside the head of a horrifying misogynist. I don't want to feel angry and afraid when reading for leisure. And I don't know what Brinkley's intent is here - if he is using the Captain as a mouthpiece for his own views, or if he is crafting a character study on the mindset of this particular brand of monster. Maybe the Captain will be redeemed, maybe he will be destroyed, maybe his dreadfulness will serve some yet-to-be-seen literary purpose.
But I don't actually give a fuck, because I'm not reading another 500 pages of this long-winded, disgusting diatribe. I just don't have the energy. 100 pages in and not a single DETAIL on what actually ended the world? FUCK this book.
December 24, 2013
Oh my Lord, is the author long-winded. There are very few books that I need to stop reading. This is one of them. The author takes 2 pages to cover what should be covered in 1/2 page. Yes, it is that long winded. Overall, a good premise and a good story for the first 1/4 of the book (before I just lost patience and threw it down). The author seemed to have a dictionary at his desk to determine alternative words, just so his diatribe did't have to use similar utterance. His discourse meandered through the thought process of his characters and discussed their motivations for every activity. (you get my meaning yet??) Holy hell, this was like taking English 201 with a prof simultaneously strung out on speed and quaaludes, who drank four pots of coffee and is fighting a raging bout with OCD. Give it a rest, man -- we just want to read something for fun. So, if you suffer from interminable insomnia, go ahead and grab this sucker. If you are spending 10-15 years in the can for B&E and need a long winded book, grab this masterpiece. If you want to enjoy your free moments in life, then run the F@ away and grab something else.
April 3, 2020
I'll finish this some other day.
September 9, 2012
I just wanted them all to die so this book would finally be over.
July 31, 2014
I really, really wanted to like this book.
Post-apocalyptic survival story aboard a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, right up my alley; however, I just couldn't get into the writing style.
Pros:
The author knows his stuff when it comes to the U.S. Navy and personnel. Great insight into the mind of a ship captain under extraordinary circumstances. A warship navigating a post-nuclear war: encountering remote islands, scavenging wasteland coasts, survivalist, modern warships, etc.
Cons:
Writing style: Lengthy chapters without a single bit of dialogue. Chapters with little to no dialogue. If you have a 20 page chapter where 2 men literally sit across from each other, you would expect to have more than 1/2 a page of quoted dialogue. Example: "We should report back to Norway." Ensues: 19.5 pages of observations, inner monologue, flashbacks, description--what the people of Norway are like, the architecture of Norway, weather of Norway, the holidays of Norway, the time a sailor got drunk while on shore leave in Norway, the disciplinary proceedings about said sailor, the one time the captain picked a purple flower while in Norway. You get the point, the level of detail and the way it is presented can be a bit tedious.
Also, it is a little dated when it comes to the treatment of women in the U.S. Navy. Back in the 1980's when this book was published, I understand that was a big deal; however, in accordance to the writing style noted above, it comes across as a bit much. E.g., 12 of us ate dinner, "2 of them were woman who sat together"; entire sections where the captain speaks to the ship's chaplain about the morality of women serving on a ship. Literally, you can't move a single chapter without the point being made that there were women serving on the ship.
I found myself skimming and skimming to find the occasional conversation or nuggets of interest to me; however, in the end it was just a chore.
If you like the premise of the book (which I thought was very interesting) give this book a try. If you find the writing style doesn't suit you after the first 100 pages, you mine as well give up because it doesn't change (actually it gets worse as the author dives into more detail after the initial "hook" chapters).
Post-apocalyptic survival story aboard a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, right up my alley; however, I just couldn't get into the writing style.
Pros:
The author knows his stuff when it comes to the U.S. Navy and personnel. Great insight into the mind of a ship captain under extraordinary circumstances. A warship navigating a post-nuclear war: encountering remote islands, scavenging wasteland coasts, survivalist, modern warships, etc.
Cons:
Writing style: Lengthy chapters without a single bit of dialogue. Chapters with little to no dialogue. If you have a 20 page chapter where 2 men literally sit across from each other, you would expect to have more than 1/2 a page of quoted dialogue. Example: "We should report back to Norway." Ensues: 19.5 pages of observations, inner monologue, flashbacks, description--what the people of Norway are like, the architecture of Norway, weather of Norway, the holidays of Norway, the time a sailor got drunk while on shore leave in Norway, the disciplinary proceedings about said sailor, the one time the captain picked a purple flower while in Norway. You get the point, the level of detail and the way it is presented can be a bit tedious.
Also, it is a little dated when it comes to the treatment of women in the U.S. Navy. Back in the 1980's when this book was published, I understand that was a big deal; however, in accordance to the writing style noted above, it comes across as a bit much. E.g., 12 of us ate dinner, "2 of them were woman who sat together"; entire sections where the captain speaks to the ship's chaplain about the morality of women serving on a ship. Literally, you can't move a single chapter without the point being made that there were women serving on the ship.
I found myself skimming and skimming to find the occasional conversation or nuggets of interest to me; however, in the end it was just a chore.
If you like the premise of the book (which I thought was very interesting) give this book a try. If you find the writing style doesn't suit you after the first 100 pages, you mine as well give up because it doesn't change (actually it gets worse as the author dives into more detail after the initial "hook" chapters).
March 15, 2011
The Last Ship by William Brinkley is a post-nuclear-apocalyptic novel which focuses on the survival of the crew of the destroyer Nathan James. Although, surprisingly, the actual actions of the crew are secondary to the incessant, introspective, ponderous narrative by the ship's captain. Many of the captain's reflections concern how much more wonderful sailors are, in every respect, when compared to other people. I guess it's good sailors are, perhaps, the only known survivors, huh? Someone did need a good editor for The Last Ship. I concur with the sentiments expressed by Publishers Weekly: "Perhaps the most surprising thing about this apocalyptic novel of the sea is that Brinkley has been able to spin so slender a plot to so great a length - more than 500 pages." Or, more precisely for my copy, 616 pages - of small type.
It soon became clear that the key for reading The Last Ship was not to savor every word (as one does when reading a truly great author, where it is clear that every word was carefully chosen), but to quickly skim over many sections of the captain's verbosity, while looking for some forward movement of the plot. Oh, and the captain repeats information too - just in case you missed something. (Kudos to the great vocabulary, even though at times reading it felt like I was at a cocktail party stuck listening to some pretentious jerk talking just to show off. See the last quote, chosen because it was actually a typical sentence.) There was also a rather graphic sex scene late in the novel that felt like an unnecessary addition and was totally out of place. Actually, trying for no spoilers here, the arrangement with the women was totally unrealistic. It would have behooved Brinkley to, perhaps, talk with some real women about it rather than relying on his imagination.
Although this is asking a lot of a reader, set the writing aside and the actual plot is decent. We don't get enough information about what started the war, but the premise that only one ship has survived is intriguing. The dilemma is in whether or not I would recommend this book to others. You might enjoy The Last Ship if you like post-apocalyptic fiction and at the same time are not intimidated by an author's excessive use of a large vocabulary (not always correctly used), and pages of complicated sentences.
Recommended for the plot, so-so for the author's writing
It soon became clear that the key for reading The Last Ship was not to savor every word (as one does when reading a truly great author, where it is clear that every word was carefully chosen), but to quickly skim over many sections of the captain's verbosity, while looking for some forward movement of the plot. Oh, and the captain repeats information too - just in case you missed something. (Kudos to the great vocabulary, even though at times reading it felt like I was at a cocktail party stuck listening to some pretentious jerk talking just to show off. See the last quote, chosen because it was actually a typical sentence.) There was also a rather graphic sex scene late in the novel that felt like an unnecessary addition and was totally out of place. Actually, trying for no spoilers here, the arrangement with the women was totally unrealistic. It would have behooved Brinkley to, perhaps, talk with some real women about it rather than relying on his imagination.
Although this is asking a lot of a reader, set the writing aside and the actual plot is decent. We don't get enough information about what started the war, but the premise that only one ship has survived is intriguing. The dilemma is in whether or not I would recommend this book to others. You might enjoy The Last Ship if you like post-apocalyptic fiction and at the same time are not intimidated by an author's excessive use of a large vocabulary (not always correctly used), and pages of complicated sentences.
Recommended for the plot, so-so for the author's writing
June 13, 2016
I am bemused by this book. I want to like it. It has a really interesting premise--the crew of a US warship carrying nuclear missiles survives a nuclear cataclysm and finds an island to survive on. One hundred plus men and some twenty plus women. You can see the interesting scenarios developing. BUT, and this really is a big but...what the heck is this author trying to achieve with his weird impersonation of Herman Melville? If I wanted to read an eighteenth century rip-roaring salty tale of the sea, I would. All in the first person narration of the captain of this sophisticated warship, I swear I keep expecting him to come out with "heave ho, me hearties" "splice the main spinnaker, Mr Hornblower" (no, I have no idea what that means either). Not only this, but he spends a vast amount of time having strange internal meditations on the beauty of nature--not wrong in itself but a little odd given the circumstances. Now, I'll take all this back and be contrite if this is a set up for a fabulous twist that the nuclear war has sent them all back in time... but I fear this is not the case.
I'll update if I can stick it out. Reading shouldn't be painful, should it?
* * *
Damn, just as I was about give up on this, the author takes us back to before the nuclear war and to the Arctic sea and for a chapter I was spellbound by the intensity of his ability to describe a tumultuous, raging storm in that terrible place and then to contrast that wildness of nature with the slow, deliberate discipline required when their orders to launch are received. They have now just sailed up the Thames and discovered England 'gone'. And yet the captain is quietly sanguine about his launching of the '12 angels' the Tomahawk missiles which he sent to a town in Russia. That he did his duty, his job.
I'm all over the place with my feelings about this book. I discovered the author was born in 1917, which might explain a lot of the feel and tone of the writing. He was a naval captain in a different era, so he clearly knows his stuff, but is projecting this knowledge forward to a time and very different situation (nuclear warships and women aboard). I know a fair bit about women in the military and I can say hand on heart that they don't, by and large, behave as these women do on this ship. Neither do men. Human being are human beings, despite military discipline, and everything that occurs in civvy street between men and women working together occurs in the military too, only with more alcohol, fitter bodies and more access to each other (we sleep where we work). The whole premise of this book-- that they only start to see a problem with the 26 women when they realise they are the last women in the world and they are the last men-- is ludicrous. There would have been multiple pairings off and relationships and orgies and engagements and harassments and pregnancies, and everything in between these, long before they limp to the tropical (Eden-esque) island.
I'm sticking it out, hoping the island will descend into Lord of the Flies mayhem.
I'll continue to update..
* * *
Not only have I given this book five stars, I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in post-apocalyptic fiction. It's a must read. I haven't been so disturbed by a book for a very long time. This novel captures the hopelessness of On the Beach in a similar way that novel did. If you can get over the verbose, weird language it's mostly written in, The Last Ship is a spellbinding, horrific tale. Make of it what you will, but I really wished there had been no women amongst these last representatives of the human race--no chance for the species to continue. I'm profoundly moved by this book, but possibly not for the reasons the author wanted me to be.
I'll update if I can stick it out. Reading shouldn't be painful, should it?
* * *
Damn, just as I was about give up on this, the author takes us back to before the nuclear war and to the Arctic sea and for a chapter I was spellbound by the intensity of his ability to describe a tumultuous, raging storm in that terrible place and then to contrast that wildness of nature with the slow, deliberate discipline required when their orders to launch are received. They have now just sailed up the Thames and discovered England 'gone'. And yet the captain is quietly sanguine about his launching of the '12 angels' the Tomahawk missiles which he sent to a town in Russia. That he did his duty, his job.
I'm all over the place with my feelings about this book. I discovered the author was born in 1917, which might explain a lot of the feel and tone of the writing. He was a naval captain in a different era, so he clearly knows his stuff, but is projecting this knowledge forward to a time and very different situation (nuclear warships and women aboard). I know a fair bit about women in the military and I can say hand on heart that they don't, by and large, behave as these women do on this ship. Neither do men. Human being are human beings, despite military discipline, and everything that occurs in civvy street between men and women working together occurs in the military too, only with more alcohol, fitter bodies and more access to each other (we sleep where we work). The whole premise of this book-- that they only start to see a problem with the 26 women when they realise they are the last women in the world and they are the last men-- is ludicrous. There would have been multiple pairings off and relationships and orgies and engagements and harassments and pregnancies, and everything in between these, long before they limp to the tropical (Eden-esque) island.
I'm sticking it out, hoping the island will descend into Lord of the Flies mayhem.
I'll continue to update..
* * *
Not only have I given this book five stars, I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in post-apocalyptic fiction. It's a must read. I haven't been so disturbed by a book for a very long time. This novel captures the hopelessness of On the Beach in a similar way that novel did. If you can get over the verbose, weird language it's mostly written in, The Last Ship is a spellbinding, horrific tale. Make of it what you will, but I really wished there had been no women amongst these last representatives of the human race--no chance for the species to continue. I'm profoundly moved by this book, but possibly not for the reasons the author wanted me to be.
March 11, 2013
This ranks as the most entertaining book I believe I have ever read. Brinkley gets the narrator Captain's thought processes perfect. How to resolve the nightmarish position in which this ship has now found itself, maintaining discipline and turning to the job most obviously at hand, how to preserve mankind, and civilization in a post apocalyptic world, all with the presence of a Russian submarine in apparent pursuit, is done with imagination and a thoroughly fast paced page turner. In its own way, it answers a lot of questions about "what if" with basic and central ideas as to "what happens now?" should the final war ever happen. What society takes over, who leads it, and how are decisions to be made? All of this is answered in sensitive and well thought out ways. This book screamed for a sequel, which was not published before Brinkley's death in 1993. If the notes for that book still exist, the family should do its best to get it written and published. I own my own copy of this book and I find myself rereading it every other year or so. It can still be found in some libraries and used book stores, and I found a copy at Amazon.com for a gift to a retired Navy friend a few years ago. Do yourself a favor and get it for yourself.
September 13, 2014
Lots of things happen in this book. The problem is that they occur with no build up, are related in as mind numbingly tedious a parade of pretentious twaddle as I've ever read, and then are over before they have a chance to start. Then, it's on to the next event, which will be equally devoid of any excitement, wit, charm or relatable characters. Repeat until the author just gets bored and decides to stop (there is no real conclusion).
One of, if not *the* worst book I've ever read. Avoid.
One of, if not *the* worst book I've ever read. Avoid.
November 7, 2014
During the Spring and Summer of 2014 I watched a cable TV series entitled THE LAST SHIP (ISBN 978-0142181836, trade paperback, $17.00). I thought the title was familiar and looked in my bookcase. There was the book by WILLIAM BRINKLEY. I realized I had bought the book about 25 years ago but had not gotten around to reading it. I am almost sorry that I did.
The story primarily follows the crew of a U.S. Navy nuclear powered, missile carrying, destroyer during and following a nuclear holocaust circa 1985. Nevil Shute had produced a similar story, ON THE BEACH, in the 1950s that I had read. That book is a FIVE STAR book. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I did not read THE LAST SHIP until now.
The premise of the book is that a war of "mutually assured destruction" leaves the world in an apocalyptic state. If there are more survivors, other than the crew of the "Nathan James", they are few and far between. On its voyage of trying to find them, the Nathan James comes across a Russian submarine. The "Pushkin" is designed to operate in Arctic conditions. The two ships meet in the Mediterranean Sea where the two captains agree to help each other. The "Nathan James" needs nuclear fuel, the "Pushkin" needs food and the crews of both need a place live. The 600+ pages of this book tells what happens to the crew members of the two ships over a two year span. The story is great, the characters are believable and the end is a surprise.
So why did I not give the book 5 stars? Whoever the editor was did a lousy job. There were sentences so long as to be utterly confusing and very hard to read. It took me about a month of 2 and 3 hours days of reading to finish. I usually read two books a week. I counted several sentences with over 150 words in them. Ugh! The author liked to use words I had never seen in a book when a more user-friendly would have sufficed. The Captain of the "Nathan James" waxes philosophic for pages on end to the detriment of the story.
It is not a book that I can recommend except to devout readers of naval fiction.
The story primarily follows the crew of a U.S. Navy nuclear powered, missile carrying, destroyer during and following a nuclear holocaust circa 1985. Nevil Shute had produced a similar story, ON THE BEACH, in the 1950s that I had read. That book is a FIVE STAR book. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I did not read THE LAST SHIP until now.
The premise of the book is that a war of "mutually assured destruction" leaves the world in an apocalyptic state. If there are more survivors, other than the crew of the "Nathan James", they are few and far between. On its voyage of trying to find them, the Nathan James comes across a Russian submarine. The "Pushkin" is designed to operate in Arctic conditions. The two ships meet in the Mediterranean Sea where the two captains agree to help each other. The "Nathan James" needs nuclear fuel, the "Pushkin" needs food and the crews of both need a place live. The 600+ pages of this book tells what happens to the crew members of the two ships over a two year span. The story is great, the characters are believable and the end is a surprise.
So why did I not give the book 5 stars? Whoever the editor was did a lousy job. There were sentences so long as to be utterly confusing and very hard to read. It took me about a month of 2 and 3 hours days of reading to finish. I usually read two books a week. I counted several sentences with over 150 words in them. Ugh! The author liked to use words I had never seen in a book when a more user-friendly would have sufficed. The Captain of the "Nathan James" waxes philosophic for pages on end to the detriment of the story.
It is not a book that I can recommend except to devout readers of naval fiction.
March 7, 2011
I read this a long time ago, but it left a strong impression. The Last Ship tells the story of the last survivors of a global nuclear holocaust: the crew of a Navy warship. As they navigate their way through horror after horror, they must form their own version of human society and try to find a way to have a future. The writing is a little stilted and off-putting at times, but the overall story is moving and disturbing, and well worth the effort.
June 7, 2022
I liked the first season or two of the show so I thought I’d try the book. Imagine William F Buckley telling you how it was in his day, throw in some ‘Merica, and a few improbabilities and there you have it.
May 20, 2009
I have to admit that William Brinkley's 'The Last Ship' is hard to rate. I I were to have discretion, I would rate this hovering between three and four stars, but to be liberal, I'll give it a four. There is something ambitious as lirerature in this work of apocalypse. The story of the un-named commander of the destroyer, the Nathan James, has been discibed as a type od 'Heart of Darkness' of Joseph Conrad fame. The Nathan James, the seemingly only ship besides a Russian submarine, the Pushkin, to survive a nuclear holocause, takes an understandingly painful and torurous journey in an attempt to find a new home admist the now contaminated world of hydrogen radiation. What he relates to the reader is a travel diary off sorts to the plight of the crew, which runs the gambit between food and fuel shortages, relations between male and female crew (the book, written in 1988, forsees a greater role of women in the military, only about a decade behind the reality), of which the Nathan James has been constructed for the inclusion of both genders, insanity, mutiny, and even serial killings. In a sense, the Nathan James, a mass killer in its own right, contains in one ship the whole issues that plague present day Earth, our own ship in the galaxy. There is even a Jesuit priest, who represents not only religion, but also a logical challenge and companionship for the captian's ideas and strategy towards the well being of the community of sailors under him. In the end, it is not only a new island that is found that could possibly safely be inhabited by the crew, but also could be a place where a population growth can occur, through the controversial means of polygamy. It shows convincingly that those who survive nuclear holocaust suffer as great, and perhaps morally greater, than those who die as a result of radiation poisoning.
All of this is done in an admirally literary style, but here is also its problematic aspect as well. Brinkley tries to be literary, and I do admire him for it. But it doesn't quite hit the mark. It is close, but with chapters that by and large begins with numerous and long narrations of life and thinking amoung the crew, which worked in the earlier chapters, but begins to bog down the work as it goes along. Also problematic is the overuse of vocabulary, feeling as if Brinkley overused a Thesaurus. We know and understand that the captain is of some academic acumin, aware and even quoting from history and literature. But, Brinkley includes such vocabulary in his internal thinking, while he is supposedly writing this as a journal to someone, as he references some sort of outside reader, as if hoping that someone other than himself reads it. This proves awkward and clunky as a narrative, and not only slows down the reading, but makes it less easy to come to terms with Thomas (the last name is all that we are given the narrator) as a man character wise, which is rescued somewhat by the interactions in the dialogues with his crew.
This is a good work as a testement to the ultimate holocaust, as between Selman's, the captain's uility science officer, with his cold and calculating, and yet not impersonal readings of radiation levels, to the challenges and burden the women find themselves in in facing their part in either continuing the human race, or being instruments in its extinction, to the Jesuits and even the captains struggles and philosophical/spiritual conflicts of facing the uncertain and un-varifiable possibility that they and a crew of about a hundred Russian sailors may be the only ones left on the planet. The only wish is that the narrative strategy would have had more varience and unobstructive vocabulary.
All of this is done in an admirally literary style, but here is also its problematic aspect as well. Brinkley tries to be literary, and I do admire him for it. But it doesn't quite hit the mark. It is close, but with chapters that by and large begins with numerous and long narrations of life and thinking amoung the crew, which worked in the earlier chapters, but begins to bog down the work as it goes along. Also problematic is the overuse of vocabulary, feeling as if Brinkley overused a Thesaurus. We know and understand that the captain is of some academic acumin, aware and even quoting from history and literature. But, Brinkley includes such vocabulary in his internal thinking, while he is supposedly writing this as a journal to someone, as he references some sort of outside reader, as if hoping that someone other than himself reads it. This proves awkward and clunky as a narrative, and not only slows down the reading, but makes it less easy to come to terms with Thomas (the last name is all that we are given the narrator) as a man character wise, which is rescued somewhat by the interactions in the dialogues with his crew.
This is a good work as a testement to the ultimate holocaust, as between Selman's, the captain's uility science officer, with his cold and calculating, and yet not impersonal readings of radiation levels, to the challenges and burden the women find themselves in in facing their part in either continuing the human race, or being instruments in its extinction, to the Jesuits and even the captains struggles and philosophical/spiritual conflicts of facing the uncertain and un-varifiable possibility that they and a crew of about a hundred Russian sailors may be the only ones left on the planet. The only wish is that the narrative strategy would have had more varience and unobstructive vocabulary.
June 27, 2016
It took me a while to become invested in this book because much of the first third of the story contains information dumps on naval procedures and protocol that didn't interest me. The rest of the book makes up for the slow beginning, however. By the end of the book, I was fully engrossed in what was happening and wanted the story to continue.
On a side note: Brinkley has an odd author quirk of using the word 'brutal' to describe everything. Thoughts, words, actions, ideas, etc. are all variously described as brutal, and the author uses the word hundreds of times throughout the book. If you drank a shot each time you came across the word 'brutal' you'd never make it through to the last page.
On a side note: Brinkley has an odd author quirk of using the word 'brutal' to describe everything. Thoughts, words, actions, ideas, etc. are all variously described as brutal, and the author uses the word hundreds of times throughout the book. If you drank a shot each time you came across the word 'brutal' you'd never make it through to the last page.
April 11, 2019
Excellent book, about surviving at all costs, really enjoyable, (wont include any spoilers), a very imaginative story, well written, the story is easy to follow and never gets dull, a sort of the final days on earth environment, well worth reading, no editorial errors, very good.
July 6, 2015
Being an old sailor I thought I would really enjoy this book. It seems like a modern day cross between Nevil Shute "On the Beach" and David Graham's "Down to a Sunless Sea". The story isn't bad but the main character rambles and complains for pages upon pages. The book could easily be cut by 1/2. Not recommended
June 6, 2016
This is an odd book, hard to rate. I would give the concept 4 or 5 stars, but the execution 2. So I give it a 2.5.
I read a snippet of a review written at the time the book was published that said "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
Mild spoilers throughout. And my review criticizes the author more than I normally would, but he's been dead for years, so I can't hurt his feelings!
The idea of there being one ship of people left after an all-out nuclear war is a great one. What would they do, how would they cope? The fact that there are women on board, which would make it possible, theoretically, to re-populate the world, is an interesting wrinkle. Especially where there are not enough women to go around. What kinds of conflicts would that cause, and how would they address them? Add in the possibility that there may be other people, but that they are a submarine full of the "enemy," is more intriguing still.
And yet . . .
There were times where this book reminded me of the episode of Friends where Joey is asked to write a reference letter for Monica and Chandler, to help in their quest to adopt a baby. Joey wanted to sound smarter, so he used a thesaurus to substitute smart words for his words, and the result was a hot mess. This book was a hot mess on a bigger scale. There were so many times where the author of The Last Ship said in 100 words what could have been said in 20, or used a really uncommon word in place of a common word, with no purpose other than sounding smart.
I get that some authors write like Hemingway and some write like Joyce, and it is a matter of taste, and not necessarily literary merit, which a reader prefers. I do lean more toward Hemingway, but I appreciate the greatness of Joyce. In this case, I did not feel at all that the author's use of long sentences and big words was great writing and just not my style. I thought it was verbosity for verbosity's sake. The writing fit the model of what the author thought great writing should sound like, but it was nothing more than a pale imitation of great writing. In my opinion.
I read a review on Amazon which said that the bad reviews of the writing in this book had to be by people who did not have the intellectual capacity to understand writing "of another time," and that that was what you get when you feed McDonald's eaters a gourmet meal. I beg to differ. First, the book was published in 1988. I don't know how old the author of that review was, and maybe he wasn't even born yet in 1988, but that is hardly "another time" when it comes to literary style. I also think I am more than smart enough to understand the vocabulary and to parse the incredibly long and complicated sentences. I just don't think there is any payoff to plowing through it.
So the writing style was almost laughably bad at times, in my opinion. I found myself skimming over long sections, to try and get to the point. But I did want to get to the point, I was interested in the story, just not that much in the narrator, who was quite the egotistical blowhard, if you ask me.
Other things I didn't like. The constant harping on the point that sailors are a breed apart, and just the right type--no, according to him, the only type--of men to get through this ordeal and save humankind. He went on and on and on about it, ad nauseum, at every opportunity. (I was not surprised to read that the author did PR for the Navy.) The repetition was not only irritating, but lacked any credibility within his own story, given that, among these alleged greatest people on earth were included **SPOILER ALERT** mutineers, suicides, rapists and murderers. In one breath he was lauding these people as almost superhuman, the greatest specimens of humankind, and in the next breath telling stories of their terrible, and human, misdeeds.
I also found quite odd the way he spoke about the women as if they were creatures from another planet. I felt like, in his head, all the men were cute puppies, and all the women were disdainful cats. I was surprised he didn't have the Captain (the narrator) come upon one of the women grooming herself with her tongue. I wonder, has he ever actually known a woman? The casual disclosure that all the women were **SPOILER** having sex with each other while they were confined below, and that the women loved the Arrangement (the schedule by which they would have sex with the men, in hopes of procreating) because it allowed them to have lots of sex with many partners, was like a teenage fantasy. END SPOILER
All of that criticism aside, I actually liked the story, and thought the way it played out was actually reasonably realistic, although I think the science was off. I imagine that in the right hands, or with a brutal editor, it could have been a true classic.
I read a snippet of a review written at the time the book was published that said "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
Mild spoilers throughout. And my review criticizes the author more than I normally would, but he's been dead for years, so I can't hurt his feelings!
The idea of there being one ship of people left after an all-out nuclear war is a great one. What would they do, how would they cope? The fact that there are women on board, which would make it possible, theoretically, to re-populate the world, is an interesting wrinkle. Especially where there are not enough women to go around. What kinds of conflicts would that cause, and how would they address them? Add in the possibility that there may be other people, but that they are a submarine full of the "enemy," is more intriguing still.
And yet . . .
There were times where this book reminded me of the episode of Friends where Joey is asked to write a reference letter for Monica and Chandler, to help in their quest to adopt a baby. Joey wanted to sound smarter, so he used a thesaurus to substitute smart words for his words, and the result was a hot mess. This book was a hot mess on a bigger scale. There were so many times where the author of The Last Ship said in 100 words what could have been said in 20, or used a really uncommon word in place of a common word, with no purpose other than sounding smart.
I get that some authors write like Hemingway and some write like Joyce, and it is a matter of taste, and not necessarily literary merit, which a reader prefers. I do lean more toward Hemingway, but I appreciate the greatness of Joyce. In this case, I did not feel at all that the author's use of long sentences and big words was great writing and just not my style. I thought it was verbosity for verbosity's sake. The writing fit the model of what the author thought great writing should sound like, but it was nothing more than a pale imitation of great writing. In my opinion.
I read a review on Amazon which said that the bad reviews of the writing in this book had to be by people who did not have the intellectual capacity to understand writing "of another time," and that that was what you get when you feed McDonald's eaters a gourmet meal. I beg to differ. First, the book was published in 1988. I don't know how old the author of that review was, and maybe he wasn't even born yet in 1988, but that is hardly "another time" when it comes to literary style. I also think I am more than smart enough to understand the vocabulary and to parse the incredibly long and complicated sentences. I just don't think there is any payoff to plowing through it.
So the writing style was almost laughably bad at times, in my opinion. I found myself skimming over long sections, to try and get to the point. But I did want to get to the point, I was interested in the story, just not that much in the narrator, who was quite the egotistical blowhard, if you ask me.
Other things I didn't like. The constant harping on the point that sailors are a breed apart, and just the right type--no, according to him, the only type--of men to get through this ordeal and save humankind. He went on and on and on about it, ad nauseum, at every opportunity. (I was not surprised to read that the author did PR for the Navy.) The repetition was not only irritating, but lacked any credibility within his own story, given that, among these alleged greatest people on earth were included **SPOILER ALERT** mutineers, suicides, rapists and murderers. In one breath he was lauding these people as almost superhuman, the greatest specimens of humankind, and in the next breath telling stories of their terrible, and human, misdeeds.
I also found quite odd the way he spoke about the women as if they were creatures from another planet. I felt like, in his head, all the men were cute puppies, and all the women were disdainful cats. I was surprised he didn't have the Captain (the narrator) come upon one of the women grooming herself with her tongue. I wonder, has he ever actually known a woman? The casual disclosure that all the women were **SPOILER** having sex with each other while they were confined below, and that the women loved the Arrangement (the schedule by which they would have sex with the men, in hopes of procreating) because it allowed them to have lots of sex with many partners, was like a teenage fantasy. END SPOILER
All of that criticism aside, I actually liked the story, and thought the way it played out was actually reasonably realistic, although I think the science was off. I imagine that in the right hands, or with a brutal editor, it could have been a true classic.
June 12, 2015
I guess like many i picked this up because i was aware of the recent TV series but also because I’m a fan of Post-Apocalyptic novels anyway. I've also really enjoyed The Destroyermen series by Taylor Anderson and was looking forward to another book about this seemingly singular breed.
Having scanned the reviews already posted i've found that many have had the same experience i had. The book is quite clearly divided into 3 sections. The 2nd section is a recounting of the events from the brief nuclear conflict to the discovery of the island and the 3rd section follows on from the First Section which recounts events shortly after finding the Island.
Again like many i found the 2nd section to be by far the best, compelling and exciting while dealing with many of the human issues that you would expect to find given the circumstances the Crew of the USS Nathan James finds itself in.
I thought the 3rd section was also decent but almost gave up in disgust about two thirds of the way through when something truly shocking happens. The reason for the disgust was because it just seemed so unnecessary and almost no explanation for it was given for the totally unjustified/ uncharacteristic actions. Anyway i gritted my teeth carried on and the author does go some way to explaining the event in a somewhat off-hand way just before the novel ended. It was enough to ameliorate the worst of how i felt at the time it happened.
That just leaves the first section. I've read enough novels with non-linear storytelling to know i don't have an issue with that particular device. The novel is written from the first person perspective of the Ships Captain. I never really warmed to him and that is obviously a problem when everything is recounted from that characters perspective. When that character seems to spend almost the entire of the first section in painful introspection, to have swallowed a thesaurus and to be seemingly incapable of thinking in short sentences then i have a real problem. Because we don't know the crew, or the issues they have faced and i simply did not feel that my empathy had been earned and had little patience with mostly of the overblown introspection that felt simply self-indulgent. The book almost lost me before i got to a place where i could enjoy the story being told.
It is a mark of how good the 2nd section is that this receives 3 stars!
Having scanned the reviews already posted i've found that many have had the same experience i had. The book is quite clearly divided into 3 sections. The 2nd section is a recounting of the events from the brief nuclear conflict to the discovery of the island and the 3rd section follows on from the First Section which recounts events shortly after finding the Island.
Again like many i found the 2nd section to be by far the best, compelling and exciting while dealing with many of the human issues that you would expect to find given the circumstances the Crew of the USS Nathan James finds itself in.
I thought the 3rd section was also decent but almost gave up in disgust about two thirds of the way through when something truly shocking happens. The reason for the disgust was because it just seemed so unnecessary and almost no explanation for it was given for the totally unjustified/ uncharacteristic actions. Anyway i gritted my teeth carried on and the author does go some way to explaining the event in a somewhat off-hand way just before the novel ended. It was enough to ameliorate the worst of how i felt at the time it happened.
That just leaves the first section. I've read enough novels with non-linear storytelling to know i don't have an issue with that particular device. The novel is written from the first person perspective of the Ships Captain. I never really warmed to him and that is obviously a problem when everything is recounted from that characters perspective. When that character seems to spend almost the entire of the first section in painful introspection, to have swallowed a thesaurus and to be seemingly incapable of thinking in short sentences then i have a real problem. Because we don't know the crew, or the issues they have faced and i simply did not feel that my empathy had been earned and had little patience with mostly of the overblown introspection that felt simply self-indulgent. The book almost lost me before i got to a place where i could enjoy the story being told.
It is a mark of how good the 2nd section is that this receives 3 stars!
July 2, 2017
The short version first . . .
There are many settings for dystopian literature. Some focus on a specific location, Area X in Jeff VandeMeer’s Area X (The Southern Reach Triology Vol. 1-3) for example. Some focus on events of man’s attempts to fix something that go horribly wrong, out of control to such a degree that the attempted fix causes a major disruption in life as we know it. A prime example is Kevin J. Anderson’s Ill Wind where an bacterial fix to a huge oil spill causes a cascading petrochemical meltdown rendering all hydrocarbon-based items everywhere to be rendered unusable almost overnight across the entire planet. Now more traditional dystopian fiction focuses on the perils of man and his weapons of mass destruction, especially those of the thermonuclear variety. There are many that I could cite, but the one in this dystopian future is the story told by William Brinkley in his 1988 novel, The Last Ship. And a more dystopic future there has never been conceived before or since. Here’s why . . .
The Nathan James is a minor member of the nuclear family with only a few thermonuclear armed missiles at its disposal. It is a multi-role ship capable of a variety of missions not all of which require the force of arms to be successful. While the search becomes increasingly futile, the crew does explore the possibilities for survivors in the areas through which they pass in their on-going quest to find survivors of the “holocaust.” Those few people unlucky enough to have survived the initial exchange, find that survival is virtually impossible anywhere. The only possibility that there might be untainted land might be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the quest for which becomes their ultimate goal. In the process or searching for survivors, Nathan James and her crew discover another ship, belonging to the other side which could pose the ultimate confrontation to end the war. The vessel is a nuclear submarine of the Russian navy, and it is a ballistic missile submarine, one of the Russians’ largest in size and number of missiles. The confrontation becomes a mission of understanding and cooperation rather than a tragic end to finish the dystopian story in one hail of missiles and to big explosions resulting the the final destruction of those who destroyed the planet in the first missile exchange. However, it does not materialize and the crews discover that they can be comrades in studying their “new home” to see if any part of it was actually habitable. To that end, the Nathan James would continue to its Pacific Ocean island search area hopefully finding uncontaminated food and water to share with the Russians who will have fuel for both ships from a nuclear fuel processing facility about which they were fully aware. The end result would be two ships with virtually unlimited range as well as having at least one location on earth that was still habitable by humans. And so the story goes, Nathan James finding more and worse contamination in Southeast Asia and the Russian sub, the Pushkin, begin their separate missions of discovery and hopefully finding the wherewithal to satisfy the needs of both ships and their crews. The hits just keep on comin,’ and the contamination gets worse before it gets better.
The story is difficult to follow at the end. Ultimately Nathan James and her crew find their Pacific Ocean island that they call home, pristine, habitable, and quite a nice place considering the ravages of their previous explorations. The end of the story is just that an end to a story. You will have to read it for yourself to find out who really wins in the end, it may not be who you thought it would be.
Recommendations? Well, to start off with, this is a story that is very dystopian, very tragic, and essentially the apotheosis of thermonuclear holocaust novels. It is grim, it is raw, and it will make you cry if you are sensitive to such things, described in the most eloquent, erudite English I have ever read. Amazingly I had to borrow my daughter’s Oxford English Dictionary to learn more than few really tough words to get into context correctly to make the most sense. It is a tough and raw story about survival in an uninhabitable planet, one which has only a mere handful of places in which humans can safely exist and thrive. The story is graphic enough that I can only recommend for high schoolers and older, and with the strongest possible parental consideration alert I can imagine. This is one rough book to get through, and it is even tougher to explain to even an English Major cum laude, certified and accredited to teach Advanced Placement High School English. Caveat emptor and bring your hard radiation protections gear. You might just need it . . . Other than that, this is one incredible read. If you can understand Mr. Brinkley’s language. You do need a dictionary to keep up in some places two or three or more times on a page. Five stars for content and story, 7 stars for the writing, and 9 stars for how hard it was to read with a dictionary and a thesaurus handy. Please believe me, you want to have those essential tools with you reading this one. Trust me you will need them more than once or twice. There is a murder mystery of sorts, and a reunion of sorts, and a tragedy or a million along the way. Good read, tough read, dystopian – Oh MY, Yes!!!
Review of William Brinkley's The Last Ship (1988, 2013) by Richard Buro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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June 16, 2021
Excellent thriller. Thoughtful and highly relevant.
July 22, 2014
I've decided to give this book two stars rather than one, because there were a few small positives. The premise was very interesting, being the reason I picked up the book in the first place. I also quite enjoyed the plot, from a high level. If someone were to summarize the novel to me I would probably be very exited to read it.
Unfortunately, everything else about it was a disaster. The biggest problem was the first person narration. A tricky thing to pull off in most cases, this problem was compounded by the fact that the narrator is completely unlikable. He wants the best for his crew, which is admirable, but he just comes across as dumb and incompetent. Which is surprising, since the author spends the whole book trying to convince us of how capable he is.
This leads me to the other big problem with the novel. I hesitate to call it a novel, because it more closely resembles a US Navy recruitment tool. Every sailor in the book is portrayed as being brilliant but humble, assertive but open-minded, capable and hard-working; it was endlessly tiring. This can be explained as the narrators skewed perspective of his crew, but that's small comfort when you are reading through the 99th speech about how amazing "Navy Men" are. At a certain point, you can only assume that Brinkley himself really believes the crap that his leading man is spewing.
The narrator is continuously following rambling philosophical tangents, wherein Brinkley tries to make him sound intellectual, but this never works. His thoughts on women, talking about them as if they are some form of alien race, only serve to make him seem sexist. The religious angle of this story could have been interesting, but the way it is addressed just seemed forced.
The writing style is awful. Brinkley makes a Navy Captain sound like some stuck up academic trying to prove how well learned he is. At one point he quotes Milton. Enough said. The only way I made it through the book was by learning how to find the few sentences per page that actually matter, and skimming over everything else.
Unfortunately, everything else about it was a disaster. The biggest problem was the first person narration. A tricky thing to pull off in most cases, this problem was compounded by the fact that the narrator is completely unlikable. He wants the best for his crew, which is admirable, but he just comes across as dumb and incompetent. Which is surprising, since the author spends the whole book trying to convince us of how capable he is.
This leads me to the other big problem with the novel. I hesitate to call it a novel, because it more closely resembles a US Navy recruitment tool. Every sailor in the book is portrayed as being brilliant but humble, assertive but open-minded, capable and hard-working; it was endlessly tiring. This can be explained as the narrators skewed perspective of his crew, but that's small comfort when you are reading through the 99th speech about how amazing "Navy Men" are. At a certain point, you can only assume that Brinkley himself really believes the crap that his leading man is spewing.
The narrator is continuously following rambling philosophical tangents, wherein Brinkley tries to make him sound intellectual, but this never works. His thoughts on women, talking about them as if they are some form of alien race, only serve to make him seem sexist. The religious angle of this story could have been interesting, but the way it is addressed just seemed forced.
The writing style is awful. Brinkley makes a Navy Captain sound like some stuck up academic trying to prove how well learned he is. At one point he quotes Milton. Enough said. The only way I made it through the book was by learning how to find the few sentences per page that actually matter, and skimming over everything else.
July 4, 2024
This is a post-nuclear holocaust novel written in the late eighties. The narrative is from the perspective of the captain of a missile destroyer which survives the exchange and seeks a safe harbor, ultimately finding one on an uninhabited island in the south Pacific. Involved also is a Soviet submarine which has also survived.
Initially, I was very impressed by the mentality of the narrator, a thoughtful seaman with a large vocabulary very much enamoured of the sea. I felt I was learning a lot about sailing and the modern navy--an important factor of which had been the recent introduction of women to the service, a topic often mulled over by the captain.
After a few hundred pages, however, the novelty of the narrator's views had worn off after much repetition. Further, I was increasingly troubled by what I took to be significant omissions. For instance, what had prompted the war? No mention is made of the geopolitics of the period. Also, what about nuclear winter? How did an (unidentified) lush tropic island escape unscathed? Further, what about guilt? This captain and his crew had contributed to the destruction, killing hundreds of thousands. There is very little representation of any regret or sense of moral responsibility.
Initially, I was very impressed by the mentality of the narrator, a thoughtful seaman with a large vocabulary very much enamoured of the sea. I felt I was learning a lot about sailing and the modern navy--an important factor of which had been the recent introduction of women to the service, a topic often mulled over by the captain.
After a few hundred pages, however, the novelty of the narrator's views had worn off after much repetition. Further, I was increasingly troubled by what I took to be significant omissions. For instance, what had prompted the war? No mention is made of the geopolitics of the period. Also, what about nuclear winter? How did an (unidentified) lush tropic island escape unscathed? Further, what about guilt? This captain and his crew had contributed to the destruction, killing hundreds of thousands. There is very little representation of any regret or sense of moral responsibility.
December 19, 2015
I was warned by a title page scrawl by someone who shared the opinion of many of this book's readers that this book was absolutely lousy with overwhelmingly cromulent words. I must be in the extreme minority as I found the vocabulary not as rough-going as all that.
Meanwhile, I greatly enjoyed the story. Few stories about nuclear war's aftermath do a good job with their topic. Besides 'Threads', that is. 'The last ship' did a better job than I was expecting. What does nuclear winter look like on the waves? What does extreme isolation do to the average navy type?
The interaction between XX and XY was done rather well imo. I feared Brinkley would summon the shade of Auel and just make a mess of the book. I was again pleasantly surprised. Anyway, I greatly enjoyed the read and may return to it in a few years.
Meanwhile, I greatly enjoyed the story. Few stories about nuclear war's aftermath do a good job with their topic. Besides 'Threads', that is. 'The last ship' did a better job than I was expecting. What does nuclear winter look like on the waves? What does extreme isolation do to the average navy type?
The interaction between XX and XY was done rather well imo. I feared Brinkley would summon the shade of Auel and just make a mess of the book. I was again pleasantly surprised. Anyway, I greatly enjoyed the read and may return to it in a few years.
January 21, 2021
Very disappointed by this, it has so much potential of telling a great story through the eyes of the captain and his rational behind the decisions he makes and the consequences of that, but yet it’s just like he’s talking about random times with a very difficult plot to follow. The only thing I liked was the detail and accuracy throughout around marine warfare like tomahawk missiles, but this is the only highlight for me.
October 21, 2017
Wow..what a long slog THAT was! On my ereader, it was almost 1,800 pages. And that was not all that big print, either.
Anyway...before undertaking this, I read many of the reviews. They are all pretty accurate and I cannot add a lot to what has been said.
This was a very strange book. It had the feel of an "epic" about it. The Iliad or Odyssey come to mind. The author used so many $64k words that if I had looked them all up, I never would have finished reading. Some of that was necessary and some of it might have just been showing off.
I read this because I have been seeing ads for the TV series that was (apparently loosely) based on this book. It is similar in many ways to "On the Beach" and other doomsday books I have read. Not as depressing in some ways, as that, because there is some slim element of hope, even in the end.
But I would not call it an "enjoyable" read. I never cared for the narrator, in the least. He seemed like an arrogant know-it-all and not a small bit psychotic. I guess SOME of that would be expected when going through what the crew went through in this book. But most of it was just there.
Other reviews have mentioned that the "sum is greater than its parts," with regard to this story, and I suppose that is true. ONE reviewer even mentioned having read the book before and deciding to do it, again. That will definitely not be me. If you like doomsday fiction, and particularly, heavily militaristic doomsday fiction, then this may appeal to you.
If you like people, you will have a hard time with many, if not most of the characters, in this book.
Things I liked: the book seemed pretty authentic and realistic, in terms of the effects of the military equipment and weapons. I mostly wanted to keep going to find out what happens to people. It was an interesting premise.
Things I did not like: most of the characterization was whacked. If I did not know who the (bozo) narrator was talking about, it might have been almost anyone. I did not like the way the book started in the middle, went back to the beginning and then back to the middle. There was no real reason to do this. It served no purpose. It just meant trying to figure out what was going on, all over again. There is a TON left unknown, which I suppose is par for this kind of course. But some of us like our stories to be resolved. This one was not. The narrator, aside from his psychotic tendencies, as mentioned above, is just WEIRD about women. One of the reviewers wondered if the writer had ever actually known or been with a woman. Hard to say. The narrator and the narration about "the women" was just plain weird. There are a couple of fairly graphic sex scenes...nothing wrong with that, I guess. The language and the tone just did not seem to fit the rest of the book.
That all said...SOME allowances need to be made for the fact that the book was written in 1988 and the writer is long since dead. The fact that he could write a book that still reads relatively current from almost 30 years ago is pretty good. It is POSSIBLE that some of the things that I see as flaws were actually intended by the author, to reflect that he sees most people as psychotic. Hard to say.
This will not go down as one of my favorite books ever. On a whole, I am glad that I read it. I feel a bit beat up, though, and I am wanting to read something a lot lighter and less condemning of the human race.
Anyway...before undertaking this, I read many of the reviews. They are all pretty accurate and I cannot add a lot to what has been said.
This was a very strange book. It had the feel of an "epic" about it. The Iliad or Odyssey come to mind. The author used so many $64k words that if I had looked them all up, I never would have finished reading. Some of that was necessary and some of it might have just been showing off.
I read this because I have been seeing ads for the TV series that was (apparently loosely) based on this book. It is similar in many ways to "On the Beach" and other doomsday books I have read. Not as depressing in some ways, as that, because there is some slim element of hope, even in the end.
But I would not call it an "enjoyable" read. I never cared for the narrator, in the least. He seemed like an arrogant know-it-all and not a small bit psychotic. I guess SOME of that would be expected when going through what the crew went through in this book. But most of it was just there.
Other reviews have mentioned that the "sum is greater than its parts," with regard to this story, and I suppose that is true. ONE reviewer even mentioned having read the book before and deciding to do it, again. That will definitely not be me. If you like doomsday fiction, and particularly, heavily militaristic doomsday fiction, then this may appeal to you.
If you like people, you will have a hard time with many, if not most of the characters, in this book.
Things I liked: the book seemed pretty authentic and realistic, in terms of the effects of the military equipment and weapons. I mostly wanted to keep going to find out what happens to people. It was an interesting premise.
Things I did not like: most of the characterization was whacked. If I did not know who the (bozo) narrator was talking about, it might have been almost anyone. I did not like the way the book started in the middle, went back to the beginning and then back to the middle. There was no real reason to do this. It served no purpose. It just meant trying to figure out what was going on, all over again. There is a TON left unknown, which I suppose is par for this kind of course. But some of us like our stories to be resolved. This one was not. The narrator, aside from his psychotic tendencies, as mentioned above, is just WEIRD about women. One of the reviewers wondered if the writer had ever actually known or been with a woman. Hard to say. The narrator and the narration about "the women" was just plain weird. There are a couple of fairly graphic sex scenes...nothing wrong with that, I guess. The language and the tone just did not seem to fit the rest of the book.
That all said...SOME allowances need to be made for the fact that the book was written in 1988 and the writer is long since dead. The fact that he could write a book that still reads relatively current from almost 30 years ago is pretty good. It is POSSIBLE that some of the things that I see as flaws were actually intended by the author, to reflect that he sees most people as psychotic. Hard to say.
This will not go down as one of my favorite books ever. On a whole, I am glad that I read it. I feel a bit beat up, though, and I am wanting to read something a lot lighter and less condemning of the human race.
March 12, 2019
"I have often felt that the captain of a Navy ship is the last absolute monarch left on earth, as close to possessing the divine rights of kings as remains."
Oh my goodness! I read this book 1. because I like post-apocalyptic books, and 2. because I have the TNT series on DVD and wanted to read the book first.
I agree with all the other reviews I've read on the book - this author did not know how to use one word in a sentence if he could use 12 instead. He pontificated. He was verbose, flowery. His writing style reminded me of some of the works from the 1800s and because of that this book feels old-fashioned.
But I persevered because if you're able to see past that, there's a good cautionary tale here.
The book was first published in 1988 so the U.S. and Russia were still in the middle of the Cold War. The book is centered around the Captain of the U.S.S. Nathan James, a huge nuclear-armed Naval destroyer staffed by both male and female sailors. It was stationed in the Barents Sea when the nuclear war to end all wars came about between the U.S. and Russia.
Other than the writing style I enjoyed the book. The author was a Commissioned Officer in the Navy during WWII (so he wasn't a young man when he wrote this book) so the Navy and nautical terms seem correct.
This isn't a book to read to cheer yourself up. It's dark and dreary at times - but then the subject matter isn't puppies and butterflies.
I think the subject matter holds up well seeing as the book was published over thirty years ago. If the author had only been less enamored of his own words...
P.S. I've read the synopsis of the series and I don't think it follows the book too much. I know it's been re-written and updated but even so, looking at my DVD cases and checking on IMDB it seems a scant amount was taken from this book. I'll try to remember to update this once I've gotten around to watching the series.
Oh my goodness! I read this book 1. because I like post-apocalyptic books, and 2. because I have the TNT series on DVD and wanted to read the book first.
I agree with all the other reviews I've read on the book - this author did not know how to use one word in a sentence if he could use 12 instead. He pontificated. He was verbose, flowery. His writing style reminded me of some of the works from the 1800s and because of that this book feels old-fashioned.
But I persevered because if you're able to see past that, there's a good cautionary tale here.
The book was first published in 1988 so the U.S. and Russia were still in the middle of the Cold War. The book is centered around the Captain of the U.S.S. Nathan James, a huge nuclear-armed Naval destroyer staffed by both male and female sailors. It was stationed in the Barents Sea when the nuclear war to end all wars came about between the U.S. and Russia.
Other than the writing style I enjoyed the book. The author was a Commissioned Officer in the Navy during WWII (so he wasn't a young man when he wrote this book) so the Navy and nautical terms seem correct.
This isn't a book to read to cheer yourself up. It's dark and dreary at times - but then the subject matter isn't puppies and butterflies.
I think the subject matter holds up well seeing as the book was published over thirty years ago. If the author had only been less enamored of his own words...
P.S. I've read the synopsis of the series and I don't think it follows the book too much. I know it's been re-written and updated but even so, looking at my DVD cases and checking on IMDB it seems a scant amount was taken from this book. I'll try to remember to update this once I've gotten around to watching the series.
April 15, 2018
The crew of the guided missile destroyer USS Nathan Hale are the last survivors of an all-out nuclear war between the US and the USSR (the book having been published in 1988). The 300+ members of the crew face dwindling food supplies, dwindling reactor capability for travel, and an increasing awareness that almost all of the planet is uninhabitable. Written from the point of view of the nameless captain (a deep, interesting but sometimes excessively wordy and introspective person), Brinkley's book gets a lot of mileage (618 pp.) out of a stark situation. The pressures on the crew (some of them suicidal, some murderous, some amazingly resilient) make up the book's center. The presence of another vessel and the discovery of seemingly untouched remote island areas are also at the book's center.
The book is consistently interesting, though long and wordy. It compares on a couple of levels with Nevil Shute's "On the Beach," a shorter and more poignant book. The ending seems hurried and I wasn't quite prepared for it, though it made sense dramatically. It was as though there were ten pages missing (they weren't, of course). With all of its faults, the book addresses important themes. It compares on a couple of levels with Brinkley's "The Ninety and Nine," a World War II era novel about the crew of an LST. For life from the point of view of a captain, I prefer Nicholas Monsarrat or Jan De Hartog--or even Joseph Conrad--but the book held my attention in somewhat the same way that "Swiss Family Robinson" once did. But it's Swiss Family Robinson with nuclear warheads.
The book is consistently interesting, though long and wordy. It compares on a couple of levels with Nevil Shute's "On the Beach," a shorter and more poignant book. The ending seems hurried and I wasn't quite prepared for it, though it made sense dramatically. It was as though there were ten pages missing (they weren't, of course). With all of its faults, the book addresses important themes. It compares on a couple of levels with Brinkley's "The Ninety and Nine," a World War II era novel about the crew of an LST. For life from the point of view of a captain, I prefer Nicholas Monsarrat or Jan De Hartog--or even Joseph Conrad--but the book held my attention in somewhat the same way that "Swiss Family Robinson" once did. But it's Swiss Family Robinson with nuclear warheads.
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