Two other reviewers mentioned “self-deprecating humor” and “self-hate”. I’d definitely go with self-hate. I’m glad I stopped halfway through the first chapter to read the reviews and learned that it doesn’t get any better. Ends up back in a cubicle? Not even a little bit surprising based on his attitude. The cover and audio sample are incredibly misleading. I’m very thankful for Audible’s return policy.

It’s been said you can learn something from everyone you meet, but I have a hard time believing it in this case, and I choose now to waste no more time getting to know Glenn D’Amato. Oh, you can’t get dates because of your tiny hands and nonexistent shoulders, pale, pudgy face, and 5’5″ height? Ever heard of strength training, sunlight, and Danny DeVito? Yes, he really does rant about his dating life, and blames its lack on those three things in particular. He rants about it, I guess, because the so-called “drive-by rejection” somehow led to his throwing his hands up in the air and deciding to go offshore sailing instead of trying to become a family man.

He’s self-conscious to the point of arrogance. Convinced he sees scowls and even snarls on the faces of the other students when he’s introducing himself in his first Basic Keelboat course, he launches into a diatribe about classism. He thinks recreational sailors, pilots and other “high class” hobbyists almost universally get involved only because their fathers introduced them to the sport at a young age, and that for someone whose father had “only a can of Budweiser and a couch,” there’s almost no chance of breaking into this exclusive world. This point of view flies in the face of most of the classics of sailing and cruising. I hoped there might be some interesting lessons about cruising learned from the unique perspective of a complete beginner with a technical inclination. He designs and builds his own autopilot (interesting and commendable), but then in a supposed emergency, instead of just grabbing the wheel, he fixes the autopilot so it can steer while he fixes the engine, which is supposedly his only hope of clawing away from shore … in a sailboat. On a beam reach parallel to shore.

Mr. D’Amato, I hope you figure out how fix your life and write about that. If this was that book, I hope you re-issue it with less self-hate in the first chapter, so that people who would really like to read that book can recognize it.