This may do for boating what Psycho did for showering—take all the fun out of it.
Pleasure boating becomes oxymoronic in the grim story of modern-day piracy.
UPI reporter and sailor Burnett was attacked by pirates on his boat in the South China Sea, which prompted him to embark on this study. It will have readers agog. Piracy is again a scourge: pirates may be freebooters or simple opportunists, terrorists, or followers of warlords, employees of organized crime groups or corrupt government officials. But—coming from Brazil, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, through the Panama Canal or the Suez, armed with grappling hooks and bamboo poles—they occupy every strait and shipping lane, ready to board anything that floats: yachts, cargo vessels, ferries, cruise ships, supertankers, the super colossal VLCCs—huge crude carriers—even ships carrying recycled nuclear material. As Burnett notes, some of these attacks are quick, little more than smash-and-grab events. They can also involve the outright theft of enormous ships, which are then repainted and used to smuggle drugs or illegal immigrants. The violence involved can be lesser or greater—Burnett details some especially horrible episodes—but the incidence is escalating. When Burnett spends time on both a VLCC and a smaller tanker in what can only be called infested waters, he portrays the chilling experience of being stalked by low-slung, ghostly boats at night. He explains the steps being taken to ward off pirates, from decks awash with halogen light and fire hoses training jets of water at the rails, to hi-tech commercial SWAT teams. Still, the pickings are too good to ignore: “If you have a spare $300,000, you can go down to the docks in Manila . . . and pick out any one of a number of ships in the harbor and a syndicate will arrange for a gang to steal it.” You don’t even have to put a knife between your teeth.
This may do for boating what Psycho did for showering—take all the fun out of it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94679-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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