Once Upon a Gypsy Moon, a Memoir by Michael Hurley

I’m a fan of true life adventure stories, and that’s made me take a look at this book which has been in my books-to-read for some time. Once Upon A Gypsy Moon is a story about a man’s love for sailing and his decision to turn to his long-imagined voyage at a time his life has come undone by a nasty divorce, losing his well-paid job with a big law firm, and losing all his money. The subtitle is all too self-important: “An Improbably Voyage and One Man’s Yearning for Redemption.” It was much less about the sailing adventure than I had hoped and way more about the author’s struggles on land. On the first page, he remarks that he’s been told there are more men alive today who have flown in outer space than who have sailed alone around the world, but in the end, after starting in Chesapeake Bay, he never got farther than the Dominican Republic. Rather than one continuous sailing adventure, Hurley kept flying home to work or go on a date, and then he would not return to his voyage for months at a time. Back on the ocean, when his motor finally went kaput, he abandoned his trip and rushed home to continue his new law practice and his new on-line relationship. I gave Hurley 100 pages before I began scanning the rest of his 261-page book. Since he quit the promised voyage around the world after failing to make even one more continent, I was willing to quit his memoir. This one does not get my recommendation.