Review
WL Rating
In her book A Pearl in the Storm, Murden takes the reader on a wild journey in a twenty foot rowboat across the heaving seas of the North Atlantic. The book could have been a simple day-by-day summary of the trip, but Murden weaves her own personal biography throughout the story in order to provide context for why she felt compelled to row across the Atlantic. In a word, Murden was damaged. As you read her book, she bares her soul describing the challenges she faced growing up defending her older, mentally challenged brother. In and out of schools, and in and out of endless fights with boys, Murden’s hopelessness becomes the central theme of her life until she finally begins to find herself in high-school. It turns out that Murden’s rowing adventure is just one of the many adventures she takes in life. Her rowing saga, however, is the most public and, perhaps, the most dramatic. While there are some passages in the book that are a bit too introspective/self-aggrandizing for me, her descriptions of being mercilessly thrown around inside her rowboat cabin during forty foot hurricane seas are amazing. Over the past few years, the term “waterman” has become an commercialized, overused and heavily diluted description (kind of wish I had a different URL at this point) of someone who excels in multiple water disciplines, e.g. surfing, spear-fishing, canoeing, etc. Nothing made me realize the silliness of aspiring watermen than reading this book. For me, longboarding, spearing a couple of undersized bass and paddling your SUP around waist-high Cardiff Reef does not a waterman make. Rather, try enduring the ceaseless trials you’d face while rowing 3,000+ miles across the North Atlantic during hurricane season, then you, like Tori Murden, could truly call yourself a “waterman.” A good summer read. (July 2009)
A Pearl in the Storm - Tori Murden-McClure
