This recounting of a Pacific run aboard a merchant marine ship from boating journalist Allen may be prosaic, but it is also lulling, as if it had caught the rhythm of wide ocean swells. Recently married to the first mate of the Endurance, a Titanic-size containership, Allen elects to go along with him on his next assignment. They would ship out of Oakland, Calif., en route to the Far East, with stops in the Aleutians, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Okinawa, and other ports of call, then make a long pull back to Long Beach, Calif. Allen's log of the trip is interspersed with annotations, histories (both personal and maritime), port tours, details of the ship's Brobdingnagian architecture, and a taste of what it is like to work for the merchant marine. She recounts the brutal hours, the quarrels and differences between crew members, the travails of women mariners. Allen depicts a world in flux (though often ruled by protocols dating back to the Hanseatic League): The arts of celestial navigation and sea savviness—skills that tempted the officers to the sea in the first place—have been replaced by global positioning systems and computer printouts. Dismayingly, too, she makes clear that the US shipping industry is taking its last bows; now down to 298 ocean vessels, it's a victim (as Allen would have it) of union bloat and flags of convenience. The book is prey to the doldrums of shipboard life, but when Allen gets a chance- -recalling a brush with mean weather or the abuse a female engineer endured—she can write with powerful immediacy. Allen's voyage may not have been ``two years before the mast'' (seafarer Richard Henry Dana is a great hero of hers)—it was actually two months aft of the mast in a sixth-floor stateroom—but one leaves her book sensing she paints a genuine portrait. (20 b&w photos, map, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-882593-20-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
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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