Contains flashes of rich material but reads like an unfinished document.
A memoir documenting an aging Swiss man’s hike from Zurich to Geneva.
The author recounts his 12-day cross-country hike in his native Switzerland. The paths were (mostly) well marked, and Bodmer, a middle-aged but active man, easily managed the terrain. After beginning in Zurich, he planned to end his sojourn at the Café de la Place in Meyrin, Geneva, where he would enjoy a celebratory beer. The stakes were low, and his only goal was to reach his destination as quickly as possible. He stayed in whatever hotel accommodations he could find, including one night in an ex-girlfriend’s caravan, and faced various obstacles and delights—rainy weather, the occasional treacherous mountain path, and encounters with locals and fellow travelers—some charming and some odd. More often, he was left alone with his thoughts, and he pondered everything from Swiss technology to football matches. This book is a shortened version of the original, which Bodmer published in German in 2022. He translated the previous work into English himself, the frequently stilted prose suggests much was lost in the translation. The narration notes in careful detail the hotels stayed in and the meals consumed, but unfortunately, it skips over more interesting subjects, like chance conversations with strangers met while walking. Those interested in traveling to Switzerland will find the premise intriguing, but the descriptions of the landscape are underwhelming: “He reaches Lake Biel. Its beautiful blue and gentle waves are calming. The hiking trail around the lake is ideal.” The story is told in third person, which has an alienating effect on what could have been a very personal story. The depictions of Bodmer interacting with women (peeking at them in the showers, referring to unattractive women as “witch” or “dragon”) is off-putting. Overall, the work feels like a series of journal entries rather than a honed memoir.
Contains flashes of rich material but reads like an unfinished document.Pub Date: July 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798329880533
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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