At its best, Gornall's prose is buoyant and watertight and his book shipshape.
Freelance journalist Gornall (Microwave Man, 2006) goes to hull and back in his quest to create a boat of simple, timeless beauty.
Armed with chutzpah, memories of nautical failures past, and a grasp of few hand tools beyond a computer keyboard, the author embarked on building one of the most exacting small wooden boats imaginable. It was a daunting task yoked to a seemingly preposterous one-year deadline. Gornall, from England's Shotley Peninsula, scoured the coast for the lumber, plans, and expert guidance he needed to make it happen. A father for the second time in his late 50s, he was determined to build the boat for his 3-year-old daughter. Dismissing “approval from the dull bureaucracy of sound judgment,” he persevered; suffering no small amount of angst, abrasions, and contusions, the author presented her with a splendid clinker-built (overlapping plank) craft in the traditional Nordic style. Gornall christened the boat Swift, hoping his daughter would treasure it one day as much as he. The author’s rivet-by-rivet account is both engrossing and occasionally confusing. Featuring a lexicon of terms that may be arcane to the uninitiated, the highly detailed narrative can become a slog. Still, it's an admirable effort at narrating a complex project usually reserved for artisanal boat builders of long experience. Gornall lends depth to the story with engaging bits of boat history, recollections of his two aborted attempts to row across the Atlantic Ocean, and a surprisingly compassionate account of growing up with an emotionally distant, alcoholic single mother. But the most touching emotions are the author’s fervent, overriding love for his daughter (with the boat as its embodiment) and his regret that he had not been more of a father to his now-grown son. “This was a thing of simple, ancient beauty,” he writes, “derived from the bounty of aged trees and the sweat of good, honest toil—my toil.”
At its best, Gornall's prose is buoyant and watertight and his book shipshape.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9939-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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