THE GALES OF NOVEMBER: The Untold Story of the EDMUND FITZGERALD

Review

SECTION ONE On November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald — a 729-foot American ore carrier known as the 'Queen of the Great Lakes' — sank in a Lake Superior storm, taking all 29 crew members to the bottom in water 530 feet deep. No distress call was sent. No bodies were ever recovered. John Bacon's account of the disaster arrives at the 50-year mark with the ambition of a full reckoning: who the men were, what the ship's owners and the U.S. Coast Guard knew (and ignored) about the vessel's condition, and why Gordon Lightfoot's song turned a maritime accident into an American elegy. Bacon draws on ship logs, weather records, survivor testimony from other vessels, and interviews with families to reconstruct the final 17 hours of the Fitzgerald's last voyage. The book is written for general readers with no prior knowledge of Great Lakes shipping, but it will satisfy anyone who wants to understand why a ship that size, on a route it had sailed hundreds of times, disappeared without warning — and who should have stopped it. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book insists on the full particularity of each of the 29 men — their names, their hometowns, their years of experience on the Lakes. This refusal to treat them as an aggregate is not merely sentimental journalism; it is an implicit affirmation that each person's life had irreducible worth. The dignity at stake is not abstract but embodied: these men were fathers, husbands, and skilled mariners whose deaths left specific absences in specific families. - **Fallen**: The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is, in Bacon's telling, not simply a weather event but a cascade of disordered choices: cargo loaded beyond safe limits, a hull with known structural concerns, weather forecasts dismissed by owners and underwriters focused on one final autumn run. This is the Fallen condition operating not in individual moral failure alone but in the institutional forms that concupiscence takes — the preference for profit over precaution that Aquinas would recognize as disordered appetite scaled to bureaucratic structures. - **Fallen (suffering and mortality)**: The book dwells without evasion on what it means that 29 men died in water so cold and violent that survival was measured in minutes. The absence of bodies — the families' inability to bury their dead — extends the wound. This is the raw face of mortality that no naturalistic account fully resolves: the Fitzgerald's final plunge names a limit that human engineering and institutional reform cannot ultimately overcome. - **Redeemed (memory and community)**: The 50-year commemorations Bacon documents, the families who have kept their husbands' and fathers' names alive, and Lightfoot's song as an act of cultural mourning all gesture toward what the tradition calls the work of memory in a community: the refusal to let the dead be forgotten. Prudence's integral part of memory (memoria in Aquinas's account) here operates collectively — the community's ongoing attention to the 29 functions as a form of justice rendered to those who cannot speak for themselves. - **Prudence (foresight and caution)**: The book is, among other things, a case study in the catastrophic cost of deficient foresight and caution. The decisions that sent the Fitzgerald into November conditions on Lake Superior — one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world in that season — can be read as a negative image of what prudent stewardship of human life requires. Bacon's reconstruction of each decision point trains the reader's attention on the integral parts of prudence by showing what their absence produces. SECTION THREE Mariton's[^1] meditation in *Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry* on the line 'sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt' — Virgil's recognition that mortal things touch the mind with tears — sits quietly behind the cultural question Bacon raises: why does a song about 29 dead ore-haulers endure for half a century? Maritain's account of poetic knowledge as a mode of contact with reality through grief and beauty helps explain what Lightfoot's ballad accomplished that a Coast Guard report could not: it made the deaths available to feeling, and therefore to memory that does not merely archive but mourns. ## References [^1]: Maritain, J. (1953). *Creative intuition in art and poetry*. Pantheon Books. p. 288 [citing R. P. Blackmur, 'Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt'].

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book takes the deaths of 29 men with full moral seriousness, refusing to reduce them to statistics or nautical curiosity — the dignity of each named person anchors the narrative.
• ✓Bacon's reconstruction of the final hours on Lake Superior illustrates how bodily vulnerability and the limits of human foresight intersect: the crew's embodied courage and the ship's material failure together tell a unified story that resists any mind-body split.
• ✓The institutional failures Bacon documents — ignored weather data, overloaded cargo, regulatory inaction — present a case study in prudence's integral parts: foresight, circumspection, and caution are each present by their absence in the decisions that sent the Fitzgerald out in November gales.
• ✓The book's treatment of the families who waited onshore and the maritime community that mourned afterward opens a window onto what Aquinas calls the bonds of justice in community: the obligation to remember, to seek truth about how the men died, and to hold accountable those whose negligence contributed.
• ✓Gordon Lightfoot's song transformed a disaster into collective memory, and Bacon's account of that cultural process illustrates how a community's grief can be carried forward through art — a movement from raw loss toward something resembling consolation without sentimentality.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book offers no explicit theological or transcendent framework for the deaths; the 29 men die without any gesture toward eternal significance, which means the Redeemed arc must be supplied entirely by the reader.
• ⚠Bacon's focus on institutional negligence and regulatory failure, while historically warranted, risks leaving readers in the register of grievance rather than moving them toward the kind of moral reckoning that produces reform or forgiveness.
• ⚠The narrative's emotional power depends heavily on the catastrophe itself; readers seeking sustained reflection on how individuals prepared, chose, or acted virtuously under pressure may find the human interiority thinner than the historical detail.