A capable and readable book, though the story is likely to draw its true audience by way of the forthcoming movie it ties...
A fishing trip turns into a very bad day in this dramatic though less fraught rejoinder to The Perfect Storm.
When he fell from Anna Mary, his lobster boat, into the sea—the result, as he ruefully notes, of an avoidable bad idea—Aldridge writes that he spent some of his time in the water pondering the “if-onlys and I-should-have-dones that would have kept me from going overboard.” The rest of the time he spent pondering how to keep from falling asleep and slipping into oblivion while trying to gain a fix on where he was in the water. A skilled seaman, he did so, and his knowledge as much as his strength and good physical condition was responsible for keeping him alive for the hours he was in the water. Meanwhile, as his shipmate Sosinski writes, the crew of the Anna Mary and the Coast Guard used knowledge of their own to locate that lone swimmer in the vastness of the waters off New England. Recounting a real event that took place nearly four years ago, the partners’ narrative has its predictable moments, just as one might expect: the regrets, those what-ifs, etc. But, though by-the-numbers in spots, this book has several virtues. For one, like Peter Matthiessen’s Men’s Lives, it is a robust portrait of working-class Montauk, the Long Island community in the shadow of the tony Hamptons that always seems to be in danger of being crowded into the sea. “The real Montauk is about the fishing,” they write. “It always was.” For another, the authors offer a richly detailed but not overburdened view of how sea rescue operations are mounted and conducted: there are probabilities and formulas involved but also gut instinct and lots of experience in play.
A capable and readable book, though the story is likely to draw its true audience by way of the forthcoming movie it ties into.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60286-328-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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