A sad story, movingly told. (8 pages b&w photos)
A dramatic debut in which Oldham relates the incredible tale of her sailing into, and surviving, Hurricane Raymond in 1983.
In September of that year, Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, departed Tahiti to deliver Hazana, a 44-foot ketch, to a couple in San Diego. On the 19th day of the voyage, 140-knot winds blew Richard overboard and capsized the boat. Forty-one days later, Oldham arrived in Hawaii alone, the Hazana mangled and mastless, with one small sail tied to the spinnaker pole. With the overwhelming death of her fiancé occurring in the first chapter, Oldham survives her solo adventure by retreating into her mind. Engaged just before leaving Tahiti, she remembers the happy scenes of their courtship: their first meeting in a California boatyard, sailing the South Pacific together, Kon Tiki Island, the pearl farm on the atoll Makemo, Bastille Day on Tahiti. Richard remains an idealization, always saying and doing the right thing. The mundane tasks of making it to Hawaii keep Oldham sane—she takes sextant readings, sails to the proper latitude, and budgets and savors her remaining food and water. She also begins having conversations with the Voice, an internal friend with a sense of humor and good advice that keeps her on course. Two months out of Tahiti, she is rescued just off Hilo, Hawaii, and given a fervent welcome from anxious family and reporters. It takes three beauticians two days to detangle her salt-matted hair. The owners of Hazana arrive and are stunned by the wreck of their boat (before and after photos are startling), and Oldham’s mother takes her home to California. A visit to Richard’s family in Cornwall, England, brings little comfort to anyone. Tami ends on a hopeful note with her marriage to Ed Ashcraft in 1992, the birth of their two daughters, and her seaside life on San Juan Island, Washington.
A sad story, movingly told. (8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: June 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6791-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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