In an account combining elements of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and a sensitivity training group, a father and son courageously voyage around the tip of South America, challenging the elements, their sailing prowess, and their capacity to get along. The elder Hays, founder and artistic director of the National Theater of the Deaf, his 24-year-old son, Daniel, and a cat named Tiger bravely sail a 25-foot boat on a 17,000 mile, 317-day adventure, navigating the fearsome Drake Passage around Cape Horn by way of the Panama Canal, the Gal†pagos Islands, and Easter Island, and emerging unscathed (save for the cat) in the south Atlantic. Written in alternating voices in ship's log form, with frequent musings on the meaning of life, death, and the father-son relationship, the terse entries mute much of the excitement inherent in such an undertaking. But the trip has its moments: As they round the Horn fighting gale-force winds and 20-foot waves, the Sparrow is momentarily flattened, and Daniel, tethered to the boat, is swept into the ocean. Most of the drama, however, is to be found in the minor power struggles between the characters themselves: Daniel, a more laid-back type, is critical of his father's dominance; David, a hard-driving parent, must admit to himself that his powers are waning, and gradually he yields captaincy of the boat to his son. These ongoing matters tend to becalm the reader in a sea of sentiment. Fortunately, the writers also comment on germane and interesting topics such as celestial navigation, boat design, and sailing techniques. The reader must care about the Hays family to be interested in this cross between a rite of passage and a sea passage, but the voyagers deserve accolades for this hazardous journey.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-102-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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