From Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Devil’s Teeth, an astonishing book about colossal, ship-swallowing rogue waves and the surfers who seek them out.

For years and years, mariners have spun stories of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dis­skipped these stories-waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. However in recent decades, as a startling variety of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized something about The Influx: In search of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants from the Ocean scary was making in the planet’s waters. They discovered their evidence in February 2000, when a British analysis vessel was caught within a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea-including several that approached 100 feet.

Simply because scientists scramble to understand this sensation, others look at the large waves as the best challenge. These are extreme surfers who journey all over the world trying to trip the ocean’s many damaging monsters. The pioneer of extreme surfing is the legendary Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in Hawaii, figured out how to plank suicidally huge waves of 70 and 80 ft. Casey follows this unique tribe of peo­ple because they seek to conquer the ultimate goal of their sport, a 100­-foot wave.

With this mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow surfers are juxtaposed against researchers’ urgent efforts to understand the destructive forces of waves-from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific in 2004 to the 1,740-foot-wave that recently leveled part of the Alaskan coast.

Like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, The Wave brilliantly portrays human beings confronting nature at its most ferocious.