A vivid and thoughtful adventure narrative that’s sure to appeal to other travelers.
Many years after the fact, writer and amateur adventurer Ancinas recounts an extraordinary seven-day adventure on horseback through the Andes in this travel memoir.
In the summer of 1984, the then-50-year-old author traveled to Peru in the company of her two best friends: Kate, a competent, athletic, and generally unflappable 60-year-old nurse, and Tricia, a former archaeology student and an insatiably curious and optimistic artist and collector. (Some people’s names have been changed in this remembrance, according to the author.) The idea originated six months earlier, when Ancinas’ friend Bill Roberson shared slides of his recent trip to Peru over dinner with her and her husband, Osvaldo, in January, hoping they might join him on his next excursion. Osvaldo wasn’t sold, but for Ancinas, the “vision of that mountain—its serene beauty and its potential violence—held an attraction for me that I could neither explain nor escape.” So she, Katie, and Tricia traveled to Cusco, where they met Bill and a host of other guides and adventurers who accompanied them on their journey. They make their way to the Urubamba Valley (the “Sacred Valley of the Incas”), where they don their gear, mount horses, and begin their trek. Myriad challenges confront the group over the course of their week: local, tourist-targeting terrorists they must avoid; severe injuries; and so many ostensibly well-laid plans gone awry that Eddy concludes, “If you don’t have a plan in the first place, you won’t have to change it.” Ancinas’ prose is sturdy and observant, registering the Peruvian landscape in fine, primarily visual detail: “Sun-scorched red clay mountains form a barrier between us and the green rolling hills that descend to the Pacific coast.” She largely successfully intersperses her travel narrative with moments that feature helpful sociocultural and historical context, as well as black-and-white photographs taken by the author on the trip—although these images seem somewhat unnecessary, as the text ends up being far more powerful than the grainy images. Overall, the memoir succeeds on the sheer strength of its passion and self-reflectiveness.
A vivid and thoughtful adventure narrative that’s sure to appeal to other travelers.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781647422776
Page Count: 200
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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