A vanishing slice of life caught with ardor and freshness.
Greenlaw (Fisherman’s Bend, 2007, etc.) returns to the Grand Banks in search of swordfish.
Writing bestsellers and pulling lobster traps out of the bay off her island home in Maine couldn’t “fill the void left in the absence of true, hardy, saltwater adventure,” so when opportunity knocked to skipper a swordfishing longliner to the blue water, Greenlaw jumped. She landed on the Seahawk, a vessel of such rank dilapidation the crew soon rechristened it the Shithawk. The crew also had varying degrees of mechanical problems—kidney stones, a severed thumb—but the author draws them affectionately as a stalwart bunch, who gravitate toward museums and Internet cafes during shore time. It’s a pleasure to be out once more on the water with Greenlaw, like hooking up again with a favorite fishing guide. Readers may have heard a few of the stories before, but the author is such an unvarnished old hand, they’re fun even in the retelling. Who can tire of sharks gnashing and thrashing around on a confined deck, or the rhythmic beauty of laying out 30 miles of line baited with 800 hooks, or heavy weather on a small boat in the big blue? The dialogue can be wooden at times, and there is a certain ripeness to some of the passages—“the diving night splashed light onto the opposite horizon, which swam like spawning salmon up the riverlike sky”—but Greenlaw speaks with unquestionable authority when fashioning the salty atmosphere of swordfishing life.
A vanishing slice of life caught with ardor and freshness.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02192-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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