In November 2011, Geoff Dyer fulfilled a childhood dream of spending time on an aircraft carrier. Dyer''s stay on the USS George Bush, on active service in the Arabian Gulf, proved even more intense, memorable, and frequently hilarious, than he could ever have hoped.
In Dyer''s hands, the warship becomes a microcosm for a stocktaking of modern Western life: religion, drugs, chauvinism, farting, gyms, steaks, prayer, parental death, relationships and how to have a beach party with 5000 people on a giant floating hunk of steel. Piercingly perceptive and gloriously funny, this is a unique book about work, war and entering other worlds.
Industry Reviews
* Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully Daily Telegraph * Stuffed with wonderful anecdotes Independent * One advantage of Dyer's attention to the minutiae of this strange world is the continual surprise of his descriptive powers; he approaches on-board rituals with an art critic's eye that sometimes renders Steele-Perkins's powerfully constructed photographs redundant Observer * A hilarious account of life on board an aircraft carrier is filled with delights...If this is the new reality, I hunger for more Telegraph * Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain Daily Telegraph * I hope one day to meet the demented genius who decided to put Geoff Dyer aboard an American aircraft carrier. The result sounds in places as if Sterne en route to his sentimental journey had paused for a week's stint on HMS Victory ... In the end one is forced to call it "a Dyer book," which luckily for him and us is a high compliment -- John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of PULPHEAD * A great day is any day you get to read Geoff Dyer, and this book is no exception. Witty, empathetic, and insatiably curious, Dyer is the perfect guide to the floating world of an American aircraft carrier. With Another Great Day at Sea he makes a perfect night landing on the "postage stamp, with elan to spare" -- Sam Lipsyte * Another Great Day at Sea, Geoff Dyer's chronicle of his two weeks in residence aboard the USS George H. W. Bush, is a tale of routine, lyricism and terror, of long hours and hard work, and of camaraderie and conviction, which are a form of faith. Original, humane, and very funny, Another Great Day is another great book by an incomparable writer -- Brenda Wineapple * Dyer stows himself away on an American aircraft carrier, fortunately, with all his hilarious tics in place. A rare kind of non-fiction, with sentences that keep on giving long after your eye has sailed on -- Steve Martin * Geoff Dyer has managed to do again what he does best: insert himself into an exotic and demanding environment (sometimes, his own flat, but here, the violent wonders of an aircraft carrier) and file a report that mixes empathetic appreciation with dips into brilliant comic deflation. Welcome aboard the edifying and sometimes hilarious ship Dyer -- Billy Collins * There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer, and in no book of his does he address his animating idea - The Only Way Not to Waste Time Is to Waste It - more overtly, urgently, emphatically and eloquently -- David Shields, author of REALITY HUNGER * One of my favourite of all contemporary writers -- Alain de Botton * I have read Geoff Dyer on World War I, jazz, photography, the Bienalle, and D. H. Lawrence, among many other subjects. It's as though his mind is slave to some unpredictable Internet browser inaccessible to the rest of us. His new book - an inimitably close study of life on an American aircraft carrier -is one of his best, funniest, and most humane yet. Geoff Dyer remains an unconventionally great writer - perhaps the most bafflingly great writer at work in the English language today -- Tom Bissell
