A rewarding tale of life on the high seas.
An exhilarating depiction of the adventurer, shipbuilder and writer Joshua Slocum, who spent nearly his entire life at sea and was the first man to sail solo across the globe.
It's tough to gauge which accomplishment merits more admiration—that Slocum left home at age 16 to start a heralded career as a deepwater captain or that in the twilight of life, he transformed a decaying sloop into a snug, fast vessel in which he sailed around the planet. Both require unimaginable stamina, courage, intelligence and love, and Slocum had plenty, as recounted in dynamic detail by Wolff (The Edge of Maine, 2005, etc.). Amid the steam revolution, Slocum held unrelenting loyalty to sailing ships, despite the frequent challenges and setbacks he and his family faced while traveling great distances to deliver cargo. On his honeymoon, he was forced to build a rescue boat from his own shipwreck. As a captain aboard the Northern Light, he faced mutiny, and on the Liberdade, smallpox. Throughout, towering storms and touchy international relations made each voyage extremely difficult. Slocum didn’t attempt a life on land until 1889, but he felt emotionally distant from both the culture and his second wife—this was an unsurprisingly brief period in which he spent most of his time rebuilding an old wreck given to him by an acquaintance. Literally and figuratively, the author writes, “when Slocum found himself in a fix he would boat-build his escape.” By 1895, the sloop was reborn as the resplendent Spray, ready for the ocean and equipped (somewhat unbelievably) with the ability to self-sail. This boat took Slocum on his three-year solo trip around the world, a feat unrivalled for more than 25 years afterward. Wolff explores both the global political atmosphere of the time and Slocum's complicated emotional state during inconceivable periods of isolation. The author frequently lauds Slocum's autobiographical works—especially Sailing Alone Around the World (1899)—describing his writing as fresh-voiced and richly nuanced, and he quotes from these publications to add context to the narrative.
A rewarding tale of life on the high seas.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4342-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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