热爱海洋和沙滩，但是整个冬天不得不留在岸上的读者们，一定会喜欢G•布鲁斯•奈赫特的新书《宏图大志》（Grand Ambition）。而当他们拿起这本关于航海的新书，一定会因为这本书的副标题而疑惑不解，直挠头皮。这条诚恳而又动人的副标题这样写道：“本书献给一条非凡出众的游艇和建造它的人们，以及一名无法真正享用它的亿万富翁。”

    奈赫特是个航海老手。他写过两本关于航海的书，都大受欢迎。一本是关于1998年的悉尼-霍巴特帆船大赛（Sydney to Hobart yacht race）。当时，这个赛事断送了6个参赛者的生命。另一本则是关于“水煮鱼”（poached fish）——既是餐厅里的一种菜肴，又是海盗非法盗捕的意思。他还是玛丽•查四世号纵帆船（Mari Cha IV）的船员之一。2005年，他们驾驶这艘船打破了尘封100多年的横渡大西洋航海时间纪录。

    这次，奈赫特写了一本深入浅出、包罗万象的手册，告诉你一艘当代的超级游艇是怎样制造的。这艘梦幻游艇的主人是一位私募基金投资大亨道格•冯•埃尔曼和他的妻子琳达。他们对现在拥有的游艇中的一艘不太满意：这艘船长197英尺，设计高度有11.5英尺，大得没法泊入他们在劳德代尔堡的别墅码头。他们打算重新订做一艘略小的游艇，大约187英尺长，8英尺高，就起名叫“琳达女士号”（Lady Linda）。他们希望这艘船就在美国制造，从而证明美国制造的游艇也能和在荷兰，或者德国那些顶级船坞建造的游艇一样好。

    Sea-struck readers enduring the long winter ashore will want to pick up Grand Ambition, the latest maritime volume from G. Bruce Knecht. And the minute they do they'll likely start scratching their heads, bemused by the engagingly frank subtitle on the cover: "An Extraordinary Yacht, The People Who Built It, And the Millionaire Who Can't Really Afford It."

    Knecht knows his boats. He is the author of two previous, well received sea stories, one about the deadly 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and one about poached fish -- the kind served in restaurants, and also the kind taken illegally by pirates. He was also, it happens, aboard the schooner Mari Cha IV in 2005 when it broke a transatlantic sailing record that had stood for 100 years.

    This time Knecht has written a soup-to-nuts account of the construction of a modern superyacht. The vessel is the dream boat of a private equity investor, Doug Von Allmen, and his wife, Linda, who have a problem with one of their current yachts: at 197 feet, with a draft of eleven and a half feet, it is too big to keep at the dock behind their house in Fort Lauderdale. They decide to commission a slightly smaller one, to be called Lady Linda, 187 feet long with an eight-foot draft. They want it to be made in the U.S.A., so as to prove that an American-built yacht can be just as good as one built in the fancy shipyards in Holland and Germany.

    奈赫特写作的大局观很棒，而且老天啊，这的确是很大的一个局！“琳达女士”总共的制造费用是4,000万美元——而且要知道，购买这类游艇的买家往往还希望将来能够用更高的价格卖出以获利。这艘游艇由3万多块铝合金零件拼接而成，总重487吨。奈赫特巧妙地描绘了金融危机来袭时，游艇的制造者、中间人和买主所承受的压力——这些压力在冯•埃尔曼的这艘游艇上被进一步放大，因为他被骗投资了一个旁氏骗局（Ponzi scheme）。作者同时也细致地描写了各个片段细节，聚焦了参与这项庞大工程的工人：一名船体装配工、一名管道工、一名木匠，还有一名在没有适当防护的条件下从事有毒工作的非法移民。奈赫特的笔触真挚而富有同情心。他刻意回避了一些航海专业术语，但海洋爱好者能够从这本书中读到的，是在海洋中逃避现实的理想和让人大跌眼镜的意外场景。也许这类书中最优秀的代表作是戴维•A•卡普兰（《财富》撰稿人）的《我的船更大》（Mine's Bigger）。这本书记录了汤姆•珀金斯的横帆船“马耳他游隼号”（Maltese Falcon）的制造过程。在《宏图大志》书中，有一个令人震惊的场景。当游艇主人第一次来查看他即将完工的游艇时，拒绝进舱和船员见面。他说：“我没必要到里面去。”但到最后，有人察觉到，其实主人对游艇有些失望。

    没错，这是一艘庞大、昂贵的游艇，但外观看上去也像一只巨大的白色篮球鞋。冯•埃尔曼在这艘游艇的制造计划中最关心的，除了钱，就是内部装潢。他们投入了巨大的精力挑选上好的瘤木材来打造床头柜，寻找亮蜜色的缟玛瑙来做成主厅的地板。但从中很难感受到他们对大海的渴望，更像是一座水上的豪华的宫殿，有一大批船员提供服务。在书的最后一章，道格•冯•埃尔曼告诉奈赫特：“大海对我来说有点失去魅力了。我们已经去过了很多地方。我仍然喜欢看到大海的景色，享受船上的服务。但一切都有点似曾相识的感觉。”

    很多人都说，不论一艘顶级游艇在你看来多么粗俗，它的制造过程都充满艺术性，凝结了手艺高超的工匠在船坞的心血。按这种说法，大家都应该去买下这本书，让奈赫特能保住饭碗，接着写下一本书。（财富中文网）

    译者：周详

    Knecht does a first rate job with the big picture, and boy is it big. Lady Linda costs $40 million to build -- and who knew that people who commission boats like this generally expect to sell them at a profit? It's constructed of more than 30,000 pieces of aluminum and weighs 487 tons. Knecht deftly describes the pressures on builders, brokers, and owners when the financial crisis hits -- and how they are amplified in Von Allmen's case when he is tricked into investing in a Ponzi scheme. The author meticulously paints the small picture, too, zooming in for closeups of people working on the sprawling project: a shipfitter, a pipefitter, a carpenter, an illegal immigrant doing toxic work without proper safety gear. Knecht's voice is earnest and empathetic, and he studiously avoids nautical cant. What a sea-struck reader really wants from a book like this, though, is briny escapism combined with scenes of jaw-dropping excess. Maybe the best of the genre is Mine's Bigger, by David A. Kaplan (a Fortune contributor), which chronicles the creation of Tom Perkins's square-rigger, the Maltese Falcon. In Grand Ambition there are some astonishing scenes, as when the owner, inspecting his nearly completed yacht for the first time, declines to visit the crew quarters, saying "I don't need to go there." But in the end one gets the sense that the material is letting the author down.

    Yes, it's a big, expensive vessel, but it still looks like another giant, white, basketball shoe. What the Von Allmens appear to care about most in this project, besides the money, is the interior decorating. They take great care selecting the burlwood for their bedside tables and the light honey onyx for the floor of the main salon. But there is little sense that they long to be at sea, even aboard a sumptuous palace with a large crew to serve them. In the book's final chapter Doug Von Allmen tells Knecht: "The magic has worn off a bit; we have been to so many places already. I still like looking at the water and the service you get on board, but there's a bit of 'been there, done that.'"

    It's often said that however vulgar an over-the-top yacht may appear to some people, its construction is a good thing because it keeps skilled artisans at work in boatyards. In the same spirit, you should go buy this book, to keep Knecht at work so that he'll write another.