Susan Casey's THE WAVE features an introduction that would be right at  home in a Tom Clancy thriller. Following the headline "57.5 (deg) N,  12.7 (deg) W, 175 MILES OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND... FEBRUARY 8, 2000,"  she launches into sixteen pages of prose describing a handful of  shipping disasters.  Have you ever been on an ocean liner where half the passengers were  turning green with nausea as the ship pitched and rolled in 25-foot  swells? That's nothing. Dead calm by comparison. Monster waves, the height of a ten-story office building (and  taller) have taken ships --big, huge ships-- and pounded, pummeled, and  overturned them, split them in half and buried them forever along with  everyone aboard under thousands of tons of water,  and it happens with a  frequency that you can't begin to imagine.  I read those first pages, and by the time I got to Chapter one, I  was electrified. This was going to be a page-turner of the first order. Only it wasn't. As it turns out, Casey's THE WAVE is about 1/3 "The  Discovery Channel" and 2/3rds "ESPN's Gnarliest, Awesomest, Surfin' of  the Century." Don't get me wrong. It's not that I have anything against people who  surf. In fact, there was a fair amount of the surfing story that I  found simply fascinating (and until reading this book, I knew NOTHING  about.)  Case in point: Cortes Bank. This is an area in the Pacific Ocean  about 115 miles off the coast of San Diego. As it happens, there is a  submerged, underwater chain of islands there, and when the large Pacific  swells --beefed up by storm fronts-- hit the shallow water... well,  surf's up, dude, in a majorly-tasty way.  Casey's description of her six-hour trip out to this isolated area  in a rather small boat with a band of some of the best surfers on the  planet looking to ride 100-foot waves was astounding. I had no clue that  surfing was anything but a near-the-shore sport. But my issue with the book --and the reason I've given it just three  stars-- is the amount of ink she devotes to the surfers, their  injuries, their families, their gear, their homes, the award  ceremonies... well, you get the picture.  The sections of the book that I was expecting --where she writes  about the science of the waves, both what we understand, and that which  remains (at this point) well beyond our ability to figure out, are very  well written. I really like her writing style, and enjoyed her 2006 book  about the Farallon Islands, "The Devil's Teeth" a little bit more than  THE WAVE, if only because the subject was a touch more 'focused'.  - Jonathan Sabin