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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
