An engrossing, detailed read about a working life at sea.
Debut memoirist O’Neill went off to sea, did not look back and has a footlocker full of tales to tell.
O’Neill signed on as a cabin boy on a general purpose fishing boat in 1950 at the age of 13. For well over a half century as a merchant mariner, he worked on more than 80 different ships, from fishing boats to huge oil tankers, sailing the world and rising through the ranks. “Hither and yon” hardly covers it, as he would be ordered from a North Sea port to the Arabian Gulf, to India, to Taiwan and then to Brazil, New Orleans, Hong Kong and elsewhere, a shuttling described with a casual aplomb that may leave landlubbers agape. And the itinerary could always change since ships chase cargo. He was forever changing jobs, signing on with this or that company to keep out of a rut and learn new skills. Some of the companies were good, others shady corner-cutters. Sometimes, he found himself stranded in some god-awful corner of the world when the company went under. He describes: the technique used to break a few whisky bottles as they are being loaded and let the contents leak into one’s billycan; what it was like to have jellyfish parts rain down on you, an experience much worse than poison ivy; delivering jet fuel to Saigon in a jumbo tanker during the Vietnam War, “accompanied by warships and fast armed launches while helicopters kept watch overhead”; and a disastrous attempt, in his own sailboat, to navigate the Grand Canal from Dublin to the River Shannon. His next jaunt, he surmises, will be “a comparatively quieter trip, to the upper reaches of the Amazon.” O’Neill is a competent writer, though no stylist. Almost every chapter begins “Then I signed on with...” and all but drowns us in detail—the ship’s registry, tonnage, engines and so forth. At times, he seems to see his audience as other merchant mariners, so a glossary of unfamiliar terms (“ro-ro,” “coamings,” “fidley”) would be welcome.
An engrossing, detailed read about a working life at sea.Pub Date: March 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491895955
Page Count: 230
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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