A few years ago I was fascinated by this profile of Max Hardberger, so when an associate of his saw my comments about it and offered a review copy of Seized, I couldn’t say no. I’ve spent just enough time working on and around boats myself to know how exciting their stories can be (but unfortunately not long enough to have many good tales of my own).

And these are some great sea stories. Hardberger is a marine repo man, an expert in sneaking illegally held ships out of port to return them to their owners. In the course of those repossessions he encounters crooked police and bureaucrats, and works with a terrific cast of partners in not-quite-crime, doing the grunt work of the complex world of international shipping.^* There’s a narrative arc to the entire book, the story of how Hardberger started out in repossession and how that unexpected career has developed. But it’s also a series of individual stories, describing in detail particular repossessions over the years. That episodic structure within an ongoing story fits Seized handily into a lineage stretching back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, and as with those classics it’s the interplay between the two layers that makes it entertaining and compelling at once.

Taken on their own, the individual stories of ships seized and criminals outwitted would become repetitive (though no less thrilling), because while each of them is different in its details the objectives and outcomes are more or less the same. But Hardberger weaves those stories with slim but efficient details of his life, from his childhood fascination with tales of maritime adventure, to his restless struggle to make a living in jobs from cropduster to high school teacher, and the triumphs and tragedies of marriage and fatherhood.

So instead of presenting himself as a larger-than-life, idealized character the way a repo captain might be in a more self-aggrandizing memoir or a bad thriller in which every character is a vaguely drawn type, Hardberger comes across as entirely life-sized and all the more believable for it. Instead of a cliché ship’s captain invented for the sake of describing an exciting job, he’s a regular, complicated guy who struggles like anyone else to balance his own desires with the demands of other people, navigate tensions between work and home, and to pay his bills and provide for his family. Instead of an idealized hero, he’s a guy doing work that needs to be done, and like anyone else in any other job he has dull hours and frustrations along the way; it’s just that other parts of his job are much more exciting than anyone else’s. It’s a strange thing to say, but so much of his story felt familiar and ordinary, and that made the exceptional and exciting aspects all the more fascinating. So as terrific an adventure story as Seized is, it’s much more than that, too, as rewarding in its humanity as in its heroics.

* The complexity of international shipping, the tangled international web in which all this takes place, is the one aspect of the story I wish had been more developed. But that doesn’t quite seem like a fair criticism, asking the book to be something it isn’t, and probably says more about my own nerdy fascination with bureaucratic histories and international relations than it does about Seized.