A precise account of what happens aboard a swordfishing boat on the Grand Banks when it is not being terrorized by a perfect storm, from a captain among the fleet. It was Greenlaw’s sister ship, Andrea Gail, that went down in the Halloween storm of 1991, a tragedy recounted by Sebastian Junger in his bestselling book. Here it is Greenlaw’s intention to tell the story of a more typical swordfishing trip, how she manages the boat, crew, and fishing during the month they will be together at sea pulling a 40-mile longline. And she does tease from the everyday a fixating description of the fisherman’s (“fisherwoman . . . I hate the term”) shipboard day, preparing for and pulling in the harvest, contending with that temperamental nuisance known as the weather, judging bait or her boss (“very pushy and never satisfied”); she makes clear the importance of a good cook: “times of bad food were also periods of serious crew problems.” Then there is the simple nature of the work, the hundreds of hours of arduous physical labor squeezed in a few weeks, under brutal conditions, that you might not get paid for. Greenlaw comes across as a savvy captain with a knack for knowing the mood of both her crew and the weather (and no shrinking violet: “The meek may inherit the Earth, but they’ll never get my piece of the ocean”). Yet there is a spit and polish to her writing that feels distant from the subject, not so much overwritten as manufactured. There is a noticeable lack of sting and fear when things go wrong. Absent as well are doubts or confusions Greenlaw might have understandably entertained about this or that, which undercuts any rawness or immediacy demanded by the retelling of events. Still, this is a welcome flip side to the multitude of hellzapoppin’ peril-at-sea stories, a world apart in its rhythms but often as not just as riveting. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6451-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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