Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.
Psychologist and former actress Stephenson (Billy, 2002, etc.) leaves her glamorous L.A. life for a literary sail in the South Seas.
The author was ready for adventure after 20 years of pursuing a career and taking care of her children. She had been reading about Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson’s late-19th-century voyages among the South Seas islands in search of a salubrious climate for Robert’s ailing health. He suffered from tuberculosis and had been a semi-invalid most of his life. A divorcée 11 years her husband’s senior, Fanny was unflaggingly resourceful, and her spirit of adventure inspired Stephenson to make her own mid-life voyage. She procured a 112-foot Florida sloop, renamed it Takapuna after her New Zealand birthplace and refitted it with all the modern trimmings. She took a crash course in sailing, though she also took the precaution of hiring a professional captain and crew, and learned to handle guns in case of attack by pirates. (Yes, they still exist, though now they’re “entirely unromantic scoundrels with balaclavas in lieu of eyepatches.”) And off she went, with transient family members and friends on board, just as hurricane season was getting underway. From Florida they sailed around Cuba to Panama, the Galápagos and on to the various clusters of South Seas islands from the Marquesas to the Marshalls. The trip logged 19,000 nautical miles in nine months, tracking the Stevensons’ long-ago, pioneering extended stays among the Samoans and other tribes they warmly befriended. Accompanying Stephenson’s cheery chronicle are excerpts from diaries and letters chronicling her predecessors’ trip. “In some of these islands . . . it was, a little while ago, a dangerous possession to own a good set of teeth, as many people were murdered for them,” writes Fanny in one of the many nifty passages illuminating the area’s archaeology and history. The literary connection is tenuous, but Stephenson’s you-go-girl tone is earnest and endearing.
Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7553-1285-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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