“Love, Piracy and Science at Sea.” That subtitle really caught my attention right off the bat. It sounds like it has something for all tastes. It delivers on it too. It’s a touching memoir of an engineer who, when his marriage was falling apart and his job dissatisfied him, found out that helping others also helped himself. When his life was at a low ebb, a small magazine article asking for volunteer sighted guides for blind sailors changed the course of Fisichella’s life. By helping blind people sail he was also making friends and connections and even started his own business to provide adaptive devices to the blind.

I loved all the details about living on a ship at sea and performing oceanographic research. I’ve always had an interest in oceanography and the world’s oceans and I think that many people are fascinated by the seas. They are so large and still so unexplored beneath the surface. I think that appeals to our spirit of adventure and it was great to read about people that are going out there and exploring areas of the world most people will never see. It was also fascinating to read how a legally blind woman could be the scientist in charge of an oceanographic research trip. Fisichella does an excellent job of explaining things in nontechnical terms and his easy narrative style made this book a pleasure to read.

Besides the love, piracy and science mentioned in the title, the author’s equator crossing ceremony and the occasion when his dog gets sprayed by a skunk right before a trip were quite memorable. There’s a lot going on for a book this size. It was so absorbing that I read it straight through.

I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys memoirs or is fascinated by tales of adventure at sea. A superb memoir, it is a very human story about how one man’s dissatisfaction with the state of his life led him to make the changes that turned his life around.

eARC for review provided through NetGalley