Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years...
Artist and critic Hill’s spry, fittingly outlandish account of his six months as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland.
“Before I took the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did,” admits Hill, whose marvelous prose recalls Michael Caine’s flavorsome voiceover for The Man Who Would Be King. In 1973, Hill was a freshly minted art student, 19 years old, looking for something out of the way. “We will pay your return fare to Edinburgh,” came the eager reply to his inquiry about a lighthouse keepership, “and sure enough there was a tiny claim form, hand typed, attached with a small gold paperclip.” What came next were stints on three distant islands—and you would have to be a hard soul not to recognize the magic in Pladda, Ailsa Craig, and Hyskeir, where Hill learned the jack-of-all-trades life: how to wind a light like a grandfather clock; how to sleep in two-hour intervals, savoring that sleep as if it was a fine wine; how to cook (he would become intimately acquainted with haggis), for food is the lubricant that keeps the lights turning; how to practice the fine, unconventional art of living in close quarters with the other keepers, three or four to a house. Conversation with his peers was as nourishing as the meals, and Hill has come to think that mandatory lighthouse training “would be enough to re-invent society” in the pacifistic, organic sense he admires. Sadly, “as I write this there are no longer any manned lighthouses around the coast of Britain. . . . It’s a damn shame and it makes you want to cry.”
Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years between the act and the telling.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-546-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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