A heartfelt testament to the power of positive thinking and a primer for readers considering open-water scuba certification.
A debut memoir celebrates the author’s determination not to be limited by her physical disability.
Myrick was born with “a congenital defect of the left arm called Radial Hemimelia…where the arm bone (radius) is considerably shortened.” Despite this, she “actually led a somewhat ‘normal’ life,” doing everything her “siblings did—playing dodge ball, softball, and jacks.” Growing up in a family that “saw me, not my hand” enabled the author to develop a can-do attitude and to persevere even when she feared death, as when she started learning to swim. Her interest in diving was born when she watched a scuba show on TV: She “was mesmerized” by the “explosion of color…Bright yellow, pink and blue fish were everywhere.” Before long, she was taking her first diving lessons. Then, for her certification dives, she and her husband, James, chose Divetech at the Cobalt Coast Resort in Grand Cayman, known for its tranquil, clear waters. But choppy seas with strong undercurrents were the order of the day. She failed her first try at certification, but she persisted, succeeding on her second attempt. In prose that is often searing, she describes being constantly worried about how people perceived her. As a child, she often asked “God to make people stop staring” at her hand. The opening chapter dream sequence during her flight to Grand Cayman provides a backdrop for her love and terror of the sea: Moving “timidly into the warm water, wading ankle deep, the water seems to beckon me,” and when it “is just below my knees, my heart starts to race; I can hear pounding in my ears and I can hardly breathe.” Readers who are interested in scuba diving should appreciate Myrick’s straightforward descriptions of the equipment and the step-by-step skills needed for open-water diving certification: “You wear the mask over your eyes and nose to provide an air pocket for better vision and equalization of pressure”; “we began switching from the snorkel to the second-stage regulator, lifting the inflator hose, releasing air from the BCD, exhaling.”
A heartfelt testament to the power of positive thinking and a primer for readers considering open-water scuba certification.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9600839-0-9
Page Count: 89
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
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
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
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