At its best, Gornall's prose is buoyant and watertight and his book shipshape.
Freelance journalist Gornall (Microwave Man, 2006) goes to hull and back in his quest to create a boat of simple, timeless beauty.
Armed with chutzpah, memories of nautical failures past, and a grasp of few hand tools beyond a computer keyboard, the author embarked on building one of the most exacting small wooden boats imaginable. It was a daunting task yoked to a seemingly preposterous one-year deadline. Gornall, from England's Shotley Peninsula, scoured the coast for the lumber, plans, and expert guidance he needed to make it happen. A father for the second time in his late 50s, he was determined to build the boat for his 3-year-old daughter. Dismissing “approval from the dull bureaucracy of sound judgment,” he persevered; suffering no small amount of angst, abrasions, and contusions, the author presented her with a splendid clinker-built (overlapping plank) craft in the traditional Nordic style. Gornall christened the boat Swift, hoping his daughter would treasure it one day as much as he. The author’s rivet-by-rivet account is both engrossing and occasionally confusing. Featuring a lexicon of terms that may be arcane to the uninitiated, the highly detailed narrative can become a slog. Still, it's an admirable effort at narrating a complex project usually reserved for artisanal boat builders of long experience. Gornall lends depth to the story with engaging bits of boat history, recollections of his two aborted attempts to row across the Atlantic Ocean, and a surprisingly compassionate account of growing up with an emotionally distant, alcoholic single mother. But the most touching emotions are the author’s fervent, overriding love for his daughter (with the boat as its embodiment) and his regret that he had not been more of a father to his now-grown son. “This was a thing of simple, ancient beauty,” he writes, “derived from the bounty of aged trees and the sweat of good, honest toil—my toil.”
At its best, Gornall's prose is buoyant and watertight and his book shipshape.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9939-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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