Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush

From a writer “whose genre-jumping refusal to be pinned down [makes him] an exemplar of our era” (NPR), a new book that confirms his power to astound readers.

As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So the adult Dyer jumped at the chance of a residency aboard an aircraft carrier. Another Great Day at Sea chronicles Dyer’s experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush as he navigates the routines and protocols of “carrier-world,” from the elaborate choreography of the flight deck through miles of walkways and hatches to kitchens serving meals for a crew of five thousand to the deafening complexity of catapult and arresting gear. Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable.

A lanky Englishman (could he really be both the tallest and the oldest person on the ship?) in a deeply American world, with its constant exhortations to improve, to do better, Dyer brilliantly records the daily life on board the ship, revealing it to be a prism for understanding a society where discipline and conformity, dedication and optimism, become forms of self-expression. In the process it becomes clear why Geoff Dyer has been widely praised as one of the most original—and funniest—voices in literature.

Another Great Day at Sea is the definitive work of an author whose books defy definition.

**

An aircraft carrier has frequently been described as a floating city. That is certainly the impression given by this unique, interesting, and surprising account of Dyer’s stay on the carrier George H. W. Bush as it cruised around the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. But this is not an ordinary city. It is a city where an outsider immediately becomes aware that it is primed for high-tech warfare. As Dyer indicates, the officers, as expected, are highly trained; but even men who used to be referred to as swab jockeys are technologically proficient in specialized areas. Their onboard leisure activities are limited, which is understandable since 14-hour workdays are common. Most of the crew handle the pressures of constant drilling necessary to maintain military readiness, but Dyer notes some cases of burnout and attempted suicide. The physical environment of the ship ranges from claustrophobic mazes of narrow passages on the lower decks to the immense open surface of the flight deck. Fascinating. --Jay Freeman

Charles McGrath*, New York Times
*“[Dyer’s] account of his stay on the ship is mostly blissful, filled with curiosity and with admiration for the crew and the dangerous, difficult work it does: repairing airplanes, flinging them up into the sky and then snagging them when they come back down again.”

NPR.org
"Dyer soars for the rest of the book, which shares sea legs with David Foster Wallce's brilliant cruice-ship essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

San Francisco Chronicle
“Terrific reading . . . . And so with this generous, illuminating and very funny book, Geoff Dyer, one of the most inquisitive writers in the English language, has proven his writing chops on land and at sea. What’s left? We need to send him to space.” 

New York Observer
“Very much the flipside of Wallace’s most famous essay, ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ . . . . Another Great Day at Sea is like the more expensive sequel with a punchier moral . . . . Where a lesser writer—or, it must be said, even Wallace—would keep an icy distance, Mr. Dyer becomes one of the crew members”

Los Angeles Times
“Dyer is to essays what Anthony Bourdain is to food.”

Boston Globe
“Dyer’s antic, anxious, inventive mind is often fun to follow”
 
Portland Oregoniain
“A revelation to lovers of literature, who’ll learn about the military from a master stylist, and to those who love ships and planes, who’ll have the pleasure of a new perspective from a great writer.”
*
Virginian Pilot
*“Dyer seems to be channeling . . . John Steinbeck . . . . The writing is loose and thin yet studded with conversational gems”

New York Magazine 
“Dyer, at his best, is outstanding. He is one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers. . . .The essential fact about Dyer’s nonfiction is that it works beautifully when it shouldn’t work at all. . . .What’s going on in these sentences is the fundamental business of nonfiction: the translation, at once exact and surprising, of world to word. . . .Dyer’s books don’t just have gorgeous throwaway moments. They are gorgeous throwaway moments, a series of extraordinary asides in the long sentence that is life.”

Time Out New York’s “Pick Your Perfect Summer Read”
“If you’re bobbing on the briny sea, you’ll relate to the author’s two weeks in the Persian Gulf and will delight in every digression about dentists and the pleasures of farting alone in one’s room.”

Flavorwire
“The average writer would make this disparity into fish-out-of-water commentary, but Dyer starts there and then goes off into space, spinning his observations into something profound and beautiful that socks you in the gut.”

Salon.com
“The notion of installing a writer of Dyer’s baroquely sensitive and self-conscious temperament aboard an American aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf is obviously a stroke of genius. . . .Thoroughly enjoyable. . . .The pleasure it delivers comes from two sources: Dyer’s potent descriptive talent as he evokes the sequestered and sometimes surreal environment and society of the carrier, and the comedy he derives from his own fish-out-of-water status and high-strung personality. . . .Dyer’s best is much more than good enough.”

Slate
“As concentratedly funny as anything he’s written….you read him for his ability to turn every topic, no matter how uncompromising, into another excellent excuse for a book by Geoff Dyer.”

The Millions 
“A unique and compelling stylist and a charming reporter, Dyer seems to have an absolute bang-up time on this assignment, and it’s a pleasure to go along with him….What I found most remarkable about this book is that Dyer’s uniform delight with everything and everybody he meets never gets monotonous.”

**Tom Lavoie, **Shelf Awareness
“Geoff Dyer is one of those writers who can’t stop—he’ll write about anything that catches his fancy and do it really well….This is a riveting (excuse the pun) excursion into bigness and ‘endless walkways, hatches, and doorways,’ and it’s totally engrossing…..Dyer goes on quite a trip and keeps us intrigued the whole way.”

Publishers Weekly
“An often hilarious and aphoristic, short-chaptered account written by a British essayist who is fascinated by American culture….a highly entertaining read.”

Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
“When Geoff Dyer wants to write about something, he gets totally into it. Be it a Russian film or yoga, Dyer’s unique take on whatever situation he’s focused on always yields a great book. In this latest case, Dyer finds himself on an American supercarrier, and the results are nothing short of superb.”

Huffington Post
**“When Dyer delves into a specific topic, he delves deeply, which is why we’re looking forward to his latest exploration: what life aboard an aircraft carrier is like. As always, he laces his observations with comedy and captivating storytelling.”

Jay Freeman, Booklist
“Unique, interesting, and surprising . . . fascinating.”

Billy Collins, author of **Aimless Love
“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.”

Annie Dillard, author of **Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“What could be better than weeks far away on the flat seas of the Arabian Gulf with Geoff Dyer? He is, if possible, even more witty and charming than usual. The carrier's hugeness, its crew's tireless cheer and openness, and the enormous mechanical and electrical forces at work everywhere fare wonderfully here with Dyer's unique combination of depth, irreverence and explosive humor.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of **Pulphead
“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. There's something like New Journalism happening but in the hands of a writer who'll suddenly flash out sentences such as, 'The sea was a prairie of glitter green.' In the end one is forced to call it "a Dyer book," which luckily for him and us is a high compliment.”

Steve Martin
“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.”

Brenda Wineapple, author of* Ecstatic Nation
“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.”

David Finkel, author of Thank You for Your Service
“Another Great Day at Sea is what we’ve all come to expect from Geoff Dyer—another great book. I loved everything about it. It’s brilliantly observed, beautifully written, incisive, funny, and filled with stirring truths about life and the value of service.”

Sam Lipsyte, author of **The Fun Parts: Stories
“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 élan to spare.”

Tom Bissell, author of Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation
“I have read Geoff Dyer on World War I, jazz, photography, the Venice Biennale, 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.”