In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

This book recounts the true history of the whaleship Essex, which was rammed by a whale in 1819. Of the twenty men on it at the time (one deserted before disaster struck), only eight survived. This book does an excellent job recounting not only the disaster and the survivors' response and tactics, but also in giving a wider, contextual picture of the whaling industry at the time. This story has been told before (by survivors, by historians, and most famously by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and by Edgar Allen Poe in Narrative of the Life of Arthur Gordon Pym), but Philbrick gives a clear, cogent, and fun-to-read (if horrifying) account of the tragedy.