A disarmingly forthright memoir that chronicles a travel-induced transformation.
McQuade remembers a cross-country bicycle trip—both arduous and romantic—with her husband.
The author and her husband, Clark, decided with surprising spontaneity to embark on a daunting trek: Travel from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, by bicycle. They were radically unprepared—both over 50 and out of shape, hardly “invincible 20-year-old athletes,” and both chose to forgo the help of technology, riding without cellphones or laptops. They encountered all manner of challenges, from the quotidian (dwindling cash, swarms of mosquitos, and hard-to-master clipless pedals) to more serious ones, like a motor home that nearly killed Clark by sucking him into its colossal draft. They stopped frequently to check out local culture and cuisine and “re-experience small-town life.” They completed the trip in 122 days, riding an impressive 3,000-plus miles. The couple reveled in their freedom while traversing the country, inspiring Clark to wax philosophic about a renewed life filled with more tranquility and fewer things and obligations. McQuade writes in companionable prose, establishing a breezy rapport with the reader. The recollection abounds with thoughtful insights about her experiences, and she candidly shares her emotional anxieties, including about the weight she struggled to shed despite her daily bicycling. The memoir is especially poignant; one knows from the outset that Clark, a man McQuade describes as her soul mate, died from an intestinal disorder in the aftermath of the trip. The book isn’t perfect; it’s far too long and includes too much detail. Also, some of the lessons the author describes border on trite, although readers’ mileage may vary: “Believe in yourself. Trust your gut and don’t let naysayers, doubters, and negative nellies sap your positive energy. The greatest reward is when you take personal pride in your own success and triumphs, especially when you believe in and respect yourself.” This is principally a love story, though, and a tender one written with lucidity and self-effacing charm.
A disarmingly forthright memoir that chronicles a travel-induced transformation.Pub Date: June 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1982256838
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Balboa Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Such thoughts are raised by one great exception to this way of our world: The Library of America. Quietly, without...
As recently as a hundred years ago, in a more assured age than this, the enduring importance of a literary career could be measured by whether an edition of an author’s collected works was issued. Bound in calfskin for the wealthy bibliophile, in a more modest cloth of some subdued hue for the less well-to-do, these sets made several statements about an age. They suggested that readers could most appreciate writers by knowing the entirety of their work and not simply one or two particularly flashy efforts. And those ranks of volumes, filling the shelves of home libraries, further showed that it was possible for individuals to possess much of the best work by the best minds.
Who nowadays would be so audacious as to assert such a possibility? The persistent literary and academic battles raging among various mutually uncomprehending camps would make consensus on most living authors almost unimaginable. And how many writers would be comfortable issuing a set of their complete writings? In a time when authors are only as memorable as their last book, when novelty is king, and when time for reading itself is forever under siege, the leisurely delight implied by collected works seems curious and antique.
Such thoughts are raised by one great exception to this way of our world: The Library of America. Quietly, without contention or confusion, The Library has been issuing authoritative editions of the work of America’s most influential 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century writers in compact, crisply designed volumes at affordable prices. So swiftly (there are now 108 in print) and with so little controversy in an era notable for wrangling has this been accomplished that it’s shocking to realize that so important a historical and cultural resource as The Library of America has been in existence for only two decades. Again this fall, the eclectic nature of the project is evident in its editors’ offerings, which include the lucid, rather urgent political essays and speeches of James Madison, the surprisingly graceful natural-history writings of John James Audubon, the five influential crime novels of Dashiell Hammett, and a further volume of the stories of Henry James. The Library’s editions are valuable in their own right, providing the finest versions of work that has shaped the national imagination. They’re valuable also, however, as a corrective to the hectic spirit of our age, and as a pointed reminder that what a writer does over a lifetime – not within the confines of one or two bestsellers – is what matters most.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-883011-70-1
Page Count: 975
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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