A lot of back-patting and New-Agey good feeling, but precious little of sailing (or emotional) substance.
Frank but self-congratulatory coming-of-middle-age memoir about sailing from Florida to Maine on a 40-foot trawler.
A New York book editor who had recently relocated to a dull managerial job in rural Pennsylvania, still reeling from her breakup with longtime girlfriend Leslie, South chucked it all to buy the Shady Lady and attend a nine-week professional mariner training course in Florida. Then she set out on the Bossanova (renamed to commemorate her fondness for things Brazilian) with two Jack Russells and a classmate to sail 1,000 miles up the East Coast. Despite the fact that John was a Republican from Chicago who drove a Cadillac and referred to women as broads, the two were surprisingly companionable; together they braved storms, navigated at night, nearly capsized and drank at marina bars. After John disembarked at Sag Harbor, Long Island, South met a good-looking sailor named Lars, with whom the hitherto exclusively gay author enjoyed a surprisingly satisfying affair while sailing to Maine and painting his barn over the summer. There’s not much substance to this flimsy narrative, which features a good deal of shipboard daydreaming about former lovers who didn’t stay. South comes across as so emotionally needy that it’s hard to see how she managed to make such a risky trip (and in fact, she relied greatly on the help of men). In the end, her account of this supposedly life-changing experience seems more calculating than heartfelt.
A lot of back-patting and New-Agey good feeling, but precious little of sailing (or emotional) substance.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-074702-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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