Don’t be surprised if tears of relief flood your eyes after finishing any number of these death-dealing stories.
Wonderfully suspenseful tales of air-sea rescue from Walker (Nights of Ice, 1997, etc.), a veteran chronicler of such acts of heroism.
Although the meat of this story is the rescue of fishermen from the sunken vessel La Conte, Walker sets the stage with a few chapters of rescue operations from the early years—a mere 20 years back—when chopper pilots and rescue swimmers counted prayer as their most valuable tool. Helicopters went down then in scary numbers, but this was the gig the Coast Guardsmen had signed on for, and it is because of their daring that what is practiced today as operational tactics were learned in the first place. Walker paints the history, geography, and citizenry of Alaskan fishing towns with great warmth and evocativeness, and then turns his attention to extreme weather in the Gulf of Alaska. It’s a triple-digit universe: waves over 100 feet, winds over 100 miles per hour, squall lines hundreds of miles in length. Unless you are in the maw of such a hellacious storm, the next most realistic thing is for Walker to describe it to you, especially a night storm, with rogue monster “pitch-black waves moving out of the pitch-black night,” then your boat slipping into the greasy depths of the trough, the air so thick with sea spray it is impossible to breathe. The La Conte never had any business in such weather, and she went down fast with no lifeboat, throwing the 5-man crew into the 40-degree drink in the middle of the night. Tethered together, they were found by a Coast Guard helicopter, but wound up spending more than seven hours in the water, through three separate helicopter missions. At one point, a helicopter was literally dodging waves, hovering at 80 feet to drop the rescue basket only to find a 100-foot monster coming down on them. Unfathomably, three of the fishermen were rescued.
Don’t be surprised if tears of relief flood your eyes after finishing any number of these death-dealing stories.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26971-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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