Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush was published by Pantheon in 2014 and records Dyer’s two-week stint as a writer-in-residence on an American aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. The premise is comic — Dyer, a self-described lazy, unfit, middle-aged intellectual, is probably the person least suited to life on a warship in the entire English-speaking world — but the execution is more complex than mere fish-out-of-water comedy.
Dyer takes the carrier and its crew seriously: he is genuinely interested in how the ship works (the flight-deck operations, the engineering, the logistics of feeding five thousand people), genuinely respectful of the professionalism and dedication he witnesses, and genuinely curious about what motivates young people to join the military. His confusion about military culture — the acronyms, the hierarchy, the rituals — is honestly reported, but it never becomes condescension.
The book is also, characteristically, about other things: aging (Dyer is acutely conscious of being old amid all these fit young people), masculinity (the carrier is an intensely male environment and Dyer’s intellectual masculinity is measured against physical masculinity), and writing itself (what can a literary writer do with this material?). The result is one of the best embedded-journalist books of the twenty-first century — personal without being narcissistic, admiring without being sycophantic.
Collecting Another Great Day at Sea
First edition (Pantheon, New York, 2014): Cloth binding, dust jacket, with photographs.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- First UK edition (Visual Editions, 2014): $15–$35