Inspiring reading for anyone who has ever dared to dream the impossible.
A celebrated endurance swimmer’s account of her life in the water and the attempts that led to her successful 2013 swim from Cuba to Florida.
Nyad’s future as a swimming star seemed fated. On her fifth birthday, her stepfather revealed that the last name he had given her not only meant water nymph, but also champion swimmer. Four years later, her mother pointed across the Straits of Florida and observed that the island that produced the culture Nyad had fallen in love with was so close “you could almost swim there.” She began training at age 10 and was soon competing at national championships. As much as she loved swimming for the highs it gave her, it was also an activity that helped her overcome the trauma of sexual abuse she faced from both her father and, later, a trusted swimming coach. By the time she had graduated high school, Nyad was a world-class swimmer, but she missed qualifying for the 1968 Olympics. She turned to open water marathon swimming in her early 20s. Fascinated by the idea of crossing from Florida to Cuba, she made one unsuccessful attempt to navigate the dangerous waters between Cuba and Key West in 1978; two years later, she ended her swimming marathon career to become a sports broadcaster and journalist. In 2010, at age 60, she began the first of four more attempts to swim between Cuba and Florida. Three years later, wearing a special protective suit and mask to protect against jellyfish stings, she managed the crossing in 53 hours. What makes Nyad’s story so remarkable, beyond the harrowing trials she faced at sea—unpredictable currents and weather, deadly sea animals—is the strength of a resolve that would not admit defeat and knew no boundaries. “Whatever your Other Shore is,” she writes, “whatever you must do…you will find a way.”
Inspiring reading for anyone who has ever dared to dream the impossible.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-35361-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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