Review: Bubbleheads

Bubbleheads by Steven Brock
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

MWSA Review

If you’ve always wondered how 126 sailors manage to live together underwater in a 300-foot metal tube for weeks at a time, you are about to find out.  Garrett Daniels is on his first underwater cruise to the Mediterranean, and he has much to discover about life in a submarine. His descriptions of canned food, 90-second showers, triple-stacked bunkbeds, and the fine points of how one “flushes” underwater will make you thank your lucky stars for your everyday conveniences.

If you were a teenager in the late seventies and early eighties, the setting of this novel will make you recall your carefree youth. If Reagan was the first president you remember well, if your favorite television show was “Gilligan’s Island, “and your favorite singer was Hank Williams Jr., you’ll enjoy this trip down memory lane. If you’re older, you’ll be shaking your head at these crazy kids. If you’re a child of the twenty-first century, many of the details will fly right over your head.

If you were in the Navy, you know who the bubbleheads are, and if you were ever a submariner, you probably don’t mind being called a bubblehead. If you were once a bubblehead, however, you will either love or hate this book.  For the rest of us landlubbers, the book may offer too much information. Brock shares with his readers all the ugly details—the odors, the rude noises, the cravings, and the hazings that take place aboard ship when men have been under water for too long. Did you know, for instance, that people don't get seasick when a submarine is traveling under water? Once the submarine surfaces, its crews are as susceptible to seasickness as the rest of us, and Brock does not spare the reader from all the disgusting details.

MWSA Review by Carolyn Schriber (March 2019)

MWSA's evaluation found a number of technical problems (misspellings, grammar, punctuation, or capitalization) as well as other problems in one or more of the following evaluation areas: content, style, and/or layout and visual.  This normally indicates a need for further editing.


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