Novelist/painter Wharton, whose last book was the nonfiction account of his daughter's tragic death in a car accident (Ever After, 1995), here tackles the more pleasant topic of houseboating on the Seine, with unexpected results. A longtime resident of France, Wharton bought a houseboat ten miles west of Paris with the intention of living there with his schoolteacher wife and children. He fixed it up; it promptly sank. Thus follows a long struggle with this determinedly unfloatable vessel. First, Wharton is nearly skinned alive while attempting to clear the debris out of the sunken boat. (He neglected to wear a wetsuit while performing his rescue mission, unaware that the Renault auto plant upriver had been dumping sulfuric acid into the water.) Next, the vessel is resurrected by the colorful Teurnier brothers, second-generation experts in the field of raising sunken boats. Finally, the author attempts to make the listing wreck watertight—in vain. Teurniers to the rescue! Their ingenious solution: to take a filthy old oil barge—which Wharton and his game family spend three full weekends emptying of oil—and put the houseboat on top of it. The resulting monstrosity is made not merely livable but lovely after much time and hard work by the author, his crew, and the occasional Teurnier brother. Wharton expounds upon the details of these labors—measurements, techniques, and more—in great detail. Now, Wharton and his retired wife live on the boat full-time. It isn't maintenance-free, but it is, finally, charming. Readers expecting charm in this slim volume, however, should beware: Wharton's gritty and unembellished story—an amalgam of boatbuilding manual and memoir of expatriate life—is fascinating but not for the squeamish.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55704-272-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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