Sea Trial
Sailing After My Father

I am a huge fan of Bill Bryson, and now of Brian Harvey. Like Bryson, Harvey writes in a self-deprecating, dry-humoured manner. Also like Bryson, Harvey's wit is often so subtly woven below the surface, I dared not speed-read. Sea Trial takes us on a turbulent voyage of circumnavigation around Vanco......more

Being in the medical field and an offshore sailor living on Vancouver Island, I thought this book would be a perfect local interest read. But I found that the author had a gloomy take on everything....places I have been and found charming, historical and delightful, he always seemed to find the nega......more

This is my choice for Father's Day this year, the perfect gift for a lighthouse keeper who loves boats, also the former owner of a sailboat, who appreciates fine writing, shares a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour with the author and whose own father was a lawyer. It's also going into the bi......more

Sea Trial is a poetic riff between sailing and the life of the author’s father. This memoir is a last love story to the author’s father and all his faults, as he finally lets him go through the understanding of the malpractice trial that ripped his father’s good name; an event his father never got o......more

I really enjoyed this book. Brian tells a great story about his circumnavigation of Vancouver Island with his wife, and dog, and weaves it together with his dead father's story about the law suit and trial that completely overwhelmed and obsessed his father during his final years. While I'm not a sa......more