By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

SIMPLE COURAGE: A True Story of Peril on the Sea
by Frank Delaney, New York: Random House, On sale: June 27, 2006.
336 pp. $24.95.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6524-0

Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea tells the harrowing tale of the cargo ship Flying Enterprise and its captain, Henrik Kurt Carlsen. On Christmas Day 1951, the ship was split open by a storm in the North Atlantic only Carlsen stayed onboard. He would remain there for more than two weeks, trying vainly to coax the floundering ship back to port in England.

Author Frank Delaney, perhaps one of the most vivid storytellers in the nonfiction genre, captures the drama of the attempts to save the ship as well as the onslaught of media attention and public curiosity that followed the event. The weather conditions Carlsen faced were hurricane-like, and Delaney writes, “If you’re on the North Atlantic Ocean in such a gale, and if the temperature is heading below the freezing point, and if, much earlier, as the wind was building, you supposed the flecks of foam and the lengthening spindrift no more than pretty whitecaps — think again.”

The world watched as many rescuers and other ships attempted to save Carlsen, and stood in awe as the captain refused to abandon ship. Nobody could fathom why he held tight to Flying Enterprise, which he eventually would abandon moments before it sank on Jan. 10, 1952.

Many provided conspiracy theories of the “secret cargo” suspected to be on the ship, but Delaney offers an exclusive account of the steadfast captain’s experience based on interviews with his wife, daughters and others. He reveals Carlsen’s multidimensional persona and, more importantly, shows his true loyalty to his mission as a captain, devotion to his family and tremendous character, which accorded him both suspicion and adulation.

When editors of Life magazine prepared to make Carlsen its 1952 “Man of the Year,” the magazine compared him to Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea, even quoting John Masefield’s tribute poem, “I mean to hang on/till her canvas busts or her sticks are gone.”

Delaney’s artful storytelling makes Simple Courage truly pleasurable to read, gripping at every turn and suspenseful to the end.

BURNING COLD: The Cruise Ship Prinsendam and the Greatest Sea Rescue of All Time
by H. Paul Jeffers, Springfield, Va.: Zenith Press, March 2006.
304 pp. $24.95.
ISBN: 0-7603-2079-9

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast last year, the U.S. Coast Guard stood as the one shining star amid the chaos of government relief efforts, providing seamless, prompt assistance to the area. The service’s rescue operation expertise certainly was not without precedent, and historians often reference 1980 for one of its most significant performances.

That year, the Coast Guard was forced into center stage when the Holland America Line’s cruise ship Prinsendam was swept by flames in the Gulf of Alaska. More than 500 mostly elderly voyagers and crew were forced to brave frigid Alaskan temperatures in rescue rafts until Coast Guard aircraft and cutters arrived on-scene.

This event briefly overshadowed the fierce presidential election campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the Iranian hostage crisis and the war between Iran and Iraq, as newly established cable news operations, such as CNN, offered minute-by-minute coverage of the event. The drama of interviews of passengers who were plucked, one-by-one, off rescue rafts proved captivating to the American public.

H. Paul Jeffers was an assignment editor and producer at a news radio station in New York that year. He spent three days assigning reporters to follow the story, He offers Burning Cold: The Cruise Ship Prinsendam and the Greatest Sea Rescue of All Time to memorialize the daring rescue operations staged by the U.S. Coast Guard, in cooperation with Canadian rescuers and the crew of a nearby supertanker.

The book shows not only how the Coast Guard rescued the passengers on Prinsendam without losing a single life, but also the service’s tremendous innovation, planning and leadership, which have withstood the test of time. Today, as millions of Americans board cruise liners annually, the Coast Guard remains the “ultimate rescue raft.”

Seapower does not review works of fiction or self-published books.