A childhood dream realized, and an engaging story well told.
The whimsically strange story of 165,321 corks, 15,000 rubber bands, and their co-evolution into a 22-foot Viking longboat.
As he tells it, former White House speechwriter Pollack had always been a builder of curious boats. One, made of orange crates, firewood, and political campaign stickers, went straight to the bottom. Another, the S.S. Milky Way (made of milk cartons), was seaworthy but had a problem with mold. Here, with a sincerity that is at once this account’s principal strength and its puling weakness, Pollack writes of becoming demoralized and exhausted by the trench warfare of politics in Washington, where as a staffer for Congressman David Bonior he was repulsed by the city’s caste system and relentless power-slinging. He chucked it all to pursue a childhood desire to build a cork boat. This meant obtaining a lot of corks and a design, enlisting friends, taking time off to make a little money here and do a little networking there, making new friends in the cork and rubber-band businesses, suffering the inevitable setbacks and slowdowns, and reveling in the breakthroughs and the acts of kindness. Among the gestures of support, both hands-on and purely verbal, Pollack includes getting tapped to serve Bill Clinton as a speechwriter and making a voyage to Antarctica as a glorified publicity man. These episodes, though they may burnish his liberal/quirky-adventurer credentials, bog down the cork boat that is the real object of fascination for readers. A labor of love and fine madness, too ungainly to even make it into the water at first, the boat had a curved prow resembling a fist giving a one-finger salute. Pollack concludes with its crazy journey down Portugal’s Douro River, a trip sponsored by his cork supplier that gave him a chance to let the boat show its stuff.
A childhood dream realized, and an engaging story well told.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42257-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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