A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN. By Peter Nichols, HarperCollins, N.Y., 2001, 290 pages, $26.

You’ve probably heard the rather derisory phrase, “About as exciting as a sailboat race,” meaning dull with a capital D. It’s not true, not true at all. You’ll know why when you read this book, for it has to be one of the most exciting, most engrossing, most pulse-pounding true stories you have ever experienced. You will, literally, be quite unable to put it down.

And it’s about a sailboat race.

Not your ordinary sailboat race, to be sure. Not even an exceptional sailboat race, such as the America’s Cup. This is the captivating, superbly well-told tale of nine men sailing solo around the world, each in his own small boat. The rules of the race – with 5,000 British pounds for the winner – forbid the sailors from making landfall, or allowing anyone aboard. Called the Golden Globe by its sponsor, the London Sunday Times, the around-the-world race began in the summer of 1968, before computers, before global positioning systems, before satellites, before the high-tech devices that reduce today’s open-ocean navigation to a push-button process. The nine men who left England 32 years ago used sextants to establish their positions on the planet’s vast seas: essentially the same navigation aid used by Sir Francis Drake four centuries earlier.

“Once at sea,” the author writes, “the men were exposed to conditions frightening beyond imagination and a loneliness almost unknown in human experience.”

Nichols knows the sea. He sailed, and lost, his own small wooden boat in the wild Atlantic. And like all solo sailors, even those who venture just a few miles offshore, he has felt the tendrils of fear that clutch at every heart whenever the sea announces its implacable self with a wave smashed over the bow, a sudden storm, or a white-maned swell that shuts out the sky.

Imagine enduring these fears in the world’s wildest seas: the tumultuous waters off the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, perpetually tormented seas that have swallowed the finest ships, the best captains, the bravest sailors. Nichols is an absolute master at putting you aboard the vulnerable vessels sailed by the nine extraordinary men who raced in the Golden Globe. It won’t matter how much time you may have spent at sea: You will live the fear.

Here you are, aboard the Victress after it is struck by a rogue wave. “Tetley was as soaked through with seawater as if he’d jumped overboard. But there was no way to dry off, no dry clothes to change into, no way to get warm … Gone was the thin membrane of shelter that permits the preposterous but precious and necessary illusion of security inside a boat … the barrier against raw fear… All that was swept away in an instant. At such a moment, the sailor fights for his life with all the desperation of a man in combat against a force he knows to be overwhelming.”

It is one of this remarkable book’s great strengths – and it has many – that the author is able to maintain this degree of tension. Somehow in all the 290 pages, the excitement maintains, as does the reader’s fascination with each of the nine men, for Nichols, in addition to his champion writing, proves a relentless researcher. His quest for details of lives lived more than 30 years ago allows him to present portraits in full. These are not line drawings or sketchy profiles, but characters, personalities, psyches in depth. We get to truly know the men at the helms of their varied and all but impossible boats.

And we get to know the sea in all its terrible dimensions. We meet dolphins (in one of the book’s most memorable anecdotes), sharks, doldrums, gales and hurricanes. But most memorable of all are the nine men. Nichols somehow has come to know them all, each one in his particular complexity. And this achievement is one of the keys to the book’s exceptional quality. Never has a sailboat race been so endlessly involving, or a sea story so truly told. But more unforgettable than these are the nine men, the “madmen” sailors who will startle you with their variety and the intricacies of their souls.

Just one will finish the race. All of them will have a place in your consciousness.

Why did they embark on such a hazardous mission?

“Provided I could go on without being foolhardy,” said one, “I wanted to see the thing through. It was my voyage of discovery, and what I wanted to discover was me.”

As a reader of this fine book, you’ll discover each sailor, the sea, and something of yourself.