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Summary: A Brigantine review
Review: This was by far the best read of the summer. I first became aware of the book at the beginning of the summer in our paper's Sunday book review. The other book " Close to the Shore" was also mentioned but "Twelve Days" seemed to be the more " definitive" account and was it ever! My husband and I both enjoyed the historical context that the book was written. It has changed the way I view sharks. Prior to this, I thought of sharks as the "perfect eating machine" as stated in the movie "Jaws". However, I now realize there is much, much more involved in their behavior. I especially enjoyed the attention to statistical accounts world wide that put the 1916 attacks in a place of importance. As a postcard collector, I will now be hunting down any cards from 1916 that may mention the attacks. Thanks Dr. Fernicola, for such an interesting and informative book!
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Summary: no equals---no comparisons
Review: When I heard about the 1916 attacks I could not imagine that someone had actually spent twenty years deciphering and dissecting the perplexing events. This is one of those bombshell exploration books that comes about every decade or so. No doubt this is the bible on the NJ attacks but the author seems to be a scientist as well, and a darn good one at that ! The book gave me background and new light to pierce the tragic events of this summer in Florida. No comparisons can be made at what I learned from this tingling beach read !
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Summary: smashingly unique/timely terror
Review: Who woulda thunk it, a shark attack book of monumental porportions that not only describes the unparalleled attacks of 1916, but also sheds perfect light on the bizarre events of 2001 in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. Fernicola is almost clairvoyent as he even includes several paragraphs on world terrorism(which we all know too well)....
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Summary: best shark read.... ever
Review: You asked for one, just one shark book/story which we could read and treasure other than JAWS. In Twelve Days of Terror you got it. Enough said....
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Summary: The Real Jaws
Review: _Jaws_ did not entirely spring from the imagination. In fact, the script pays tribute to one of its main sources. After studying up on shark attacks, the police chief (who is worried about them) tries to convince the mayor (who is worried about his town's tourist income) by explicitly referring to the rogue shark attacks of New Jersey in 1916. In _Twelve Days of Terror: A Definitive Investigation of the 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks_ (Lyons Press), Richard G. Fernicola, MD cannot help drawing parallels between the movie and the historic attacks. His reassembling of the story is fascinating. Fernicola has published about them before, but they seem to be an abiding hobby for him, as the current book represents a couple of decades of research. He has also researched television documentaries on the subject, and on killer sharks in general. He might not make his enthusiasm completely contagious to the reader. It is clear that he is not a professional author, but he has marshaled his facts and presents them as might a congenial avuncular story teller, with a tale to chill your blood.No one in the 1916 waves was worried about sharks. Before that time there had been no documented shark attacks in temperate waters. Fernicola describes the increasing doom as a shark (and he gives evidence that the havoc was produced by just one) makes its killing way north along the coast. The climax of the killing (as in the movie) was when the shark swept into Matawan Creek, a small tidal inlet where it was spotted by the crusty old salt Captain Thomas Cottrell. He did all he could to warn his fellow citizens, who didn't believe him, and were surprised that he should be showing such a splendid sense of prankish humor. The most exciting writing in _Twelve Days_ is the Captain's dash of warning the town, and it's limited success. It must be said that _Twelve Days of Terror_ is on the most part not an exciting book. Once the twelve days are past, there is a good deal of scientific information and speculation. For instance, Fernicola, who practices pain management, gets to explain why being dismembered by a shark may not be the most painful of deaths. He has described in detail the wounds of the five killed by the shark, and the one person who lived. He describes the surprising theory of the time that U-boats of Germany (with which the US was not yet at war) had disturbed the waters or the sensing systems of the sharks to bring them in close, perhaps deliberately. He has often injected himself into the story, telling about his interviews and how he got to see newspapers of the period; while this might be distracting from his story, it also helps note that as history, it is fading into a past of imperfect documentation. For instance, he explains how excited he was to find a woman who was an eyewitness to the attack on the second victim, and how he scheduled a taped interview for the very next day, by which time she had quietly died in her sleep. This theme is throughout the book. The hero of the Matawan Creek attacks, who himself died from shark wounds, had only days before taken a out a life insurance policy, giving as payment a suit from his shop rather than cash. His parents used the money to buy a stained glass window in his memory, but the church has since been torn down, and no one knows where the window has gone. The area around Matawan has changed irrevocably. There were no further deaths after the twelve days, and soon America had a war to worry about, and shark fever subsided. It has not really gone away, and novelists, moviemakers, the nightly news, and even historians can tell us shark tales, and make us shiver.
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