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
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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