An engaging memoir of mishaps and survival in the Caribbean.
Debut author Haddad recounts the story of when he and four other teenagers became stranded in the Blue Mountains of his native Jamaica.
In 1967, the author, then a high school student at prestigious Jamaica College in Kingston, overheard that a group of his classmates were planning a hike to Blue Mountain Peak, and he quickly asked to join them. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that George Hussey, the group leader, was planning “a non-traditional hike” to the summit. “Non-traditional” turned out to be an understatement. After setting out on a Saturday, the boys soon lost track of their unmarked trail and went adrift in a wilderness of fog, hills, and jungle. Their supplies started to run out, and soon it was Wednesday, the planned day of their return—and they were nowhere near home. They wandered helplessly as their parents back home began to worry, and soon a rescue effort was launched to locate them. In addition to dealing with animals and the elements, the five boys—weak from exposure and hunger—contended with a deteriorating group dynamic. What’s more, Haddad was haunted by his knowledge of a similar event from 30 years before, when five other Jamaica College students became lost among the Blue Mountains. Haddad tells his story with thoroughness and care, including the recollections of his friends and accounts from contemporary newspaper articles as well as copious endnotes for each chapter. His narrative is perhaps not as dramatic or brutal as some other tales of hikers stranded in the wild, but he tells it in a way that maximizes its tension. A quiet sense of dread builds as readers move through each successive chapter, for although we know that Haddad will eventually come back down from the mountains, we don’t know at what cost. With the wisdom that comes with a half-century of hindsight, the author dissects the minutiae of the trip—the rations, the routes—as well as the psyches of the teenagers who walked the miles. By the end, the hills of Jamaica seem as imposing and remote as the Himalayas.
An engaging memoir of mishaps and survival in the Caribbean.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9940343-1-1
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Rossi Resources
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
