An account of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Race debacle, this one focusing on three of the participants, from Wall Street Journal correspondent Knecht.
Anyone who sails across the Bass Strait from Sydney, Australia, to Hobart, Tasmania, will come up against some of the nastiest blue water on the globe. The annual race that has run this course for the last half-century is famously plagued by particularly cruel weather that comes in intervals of seven years—and 1998 lived up to its seventh-year billing by throwing the worst storm ever upon the contestants. Severe storm warnings were posted before and during the early hours of the event, but no one expected the 100-foot waves brought about by a handful of mad and convergent weather systems. Knecht concentrates the first half of his account on three of the participants (all of great wealth) who flew in the face of danger: Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Rob Kothe (a manufacturer of lifeline-throwing guns), and retailer Richard Winning. Although the author suggests that the men were variously “motivated by a kind of deeply rooted ambition that would never be satisfied,” possessed of an “abiding hunger for the kind of glory that winning the Hobart could bring,” or gnawed by a “sense that he was part of a generation that has never faced the kind of challenges that men should,” none of the reasons adequately explains why they would tempt such horrid fate (since the Bass Strait’s reputation was notorious). More commanding is Knecht’s handling of the storm-lashed hours at sea, as the crews of the three boats were pounded mercilessly—sailors were lost on both the Kothe and the Winning boats—while the heroic search-and-rescue squads pulled the lucky ones to safety.
While the disaster makes for some spellbinding reading, Knecht’s treatment of what prompted the sailors to take to the seas not only falls short, it falls prey to their macho swagger: “Such is love,” he quips of their mortally reckless behavior. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: June 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-49955-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Categories: NATURE | SPORTS & RECREATION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | HEALTH & FITNESS | SPORTS & RECREATION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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