The Italian ship that wrecked off the country's western coast has cruising and its perils on the collective brain. And that happens to be a much written about subject in the annals of classic nonfiction feature writing. The most famous effort is David Foster Wallace's "Shipping Out," later retitled "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

But that is hardly where it ends.

"When the French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was captured by a raggedy, hopped-up band of Somali pirates last spring, in the Gulf of Aden, it looked as if the bandits had bitten off more than they could chew," William Langewiesche once wrote. "But after a week-long standoff, they got what they had come for—a $2.15 million ransom."

Rolf Potts once joined a ship full of Trekkies on a cruise to Bermuda.

Henry Alford attended a cruise put on by The Nation magazine. "The 460 of us — about a fourth of the ship’s passengers — were welcomed at a cocktail party held poolside on the Lido Deck. Two things quickly became clear here," he wrote. "First, the diversity and intellectual accomplishments of the 460 were fairly staggering — included among the Nation readers who paid $1,991 to $8,657 for the cruise were many academics, several judges, a founder of The Chronicle of Higher Education, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, a retired Army major, a steel company vice president, a former drug trafficker, four granddaughters aged 15 to 22, State Representative Mike Boland of Illinois, the public health expert Dr. Quentin Young and the feminist author Marilyn French. Second, many of the so-called cruisers were unhappy that the 2000 election spoiler Ralph Nader was on board."

And Jon Ronson booked himself passage on a cruise ship to investigate. "When Rebecca Coriam vanished from the Disney Wonder in March, hers became one of the 171 mysterious cruise ship disappearances in the past decade," he wrote. "So what happened?"