A tribute to the spirit of adventure, akin to Robin Lee Graham’s Dove.
The rousing account of a 17-year-old Australian’s solo, nonstop sail around the world in his yacht, the Lionheart, published to coincide with the airing of a National Geographic special about the journey.
After 11 months at sea and nearly 27,000 nautical miles, Jesse Martin became the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe. When he set sail in late 1998, the voyage “was the culmination of years of dreaming.” Reared in the Daintree rainforest, Martin had a colorful childhood. At age 11, he was backpacking through Southeast Asia with his mother and his brother Beau; by 14, Jesse had already completed a three-month sailing trip from Melbourne to Cape York with Beau and their father. One year later, Jesse and Beau kayaked in Papua New Guinea and wrote an article about their experiences for Australian Geographic. When Martin decided to sail around the world, he notes, “I started from scratch, with no boat, no equipment, little training, and even less experience.” To support the endeavor, he approached Australian Geographic and a host of other potential sponsors. Something about the teen inspired confidence, and many companies signed on. In order to attain the record of an unassisted solo journey, Martin could not take supplies on board during his journey, although he was allowed to hand off garbage and at the halfway point to take on mail, which had to be inspected by an official to verify that it contained nothing that could assist him. The rapid narrative is peppered with Martin’s journal entries, which reveal the remarkable teen’s complexity. One part extremely competent sailor, he repairs a damaged furler and fixes the wind generator after a bird crashes into the blades. And one part forgetful teen, he neglects to pack a comb and for the next 11 months must use a fork to groom his hair.
A tribute to the spirit of adventure, akin to Robin Lee Graham’s Dove.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-86508-347-X
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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