A vigorous tale of human ambition, technical challenge, and nervy attitude.
A blow-by-blow chronicle of attempts to reach the maximum depths of all five oceans.
Victor Vescovo, a wealthy explorer from Texas, had already made it to the summits of the highest peaks on each of the seven continents and skied both poles when he decided to seek the bottoms of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern oceans. While three individuals had already traveled by submersible to the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, no one had tackled all five oceans, let alone all in the same year. Young narrates the quest in granular detail, which works in some places and not in others, much like the submersible that Vescovo commissioned to be designed and built for his adventure. The construction particulars of the submersible, christened the Limiting Factor, are fun to explore with Young, as are the “share of gremlins” discovered during the sea trials. However, minutiae such as the “high-end coffee maker that produced espresso and lattes” sometimes bog down the narrative, which is further complicated by occasional awkward sentences—e.g., “Vescovo and Ramsay had extensively review [sic] of metals and eventually, mutually concluded that titanium would be the best bet.” On the whole, however, the story is readable and entertaining, whether the author is discussing drama on the high seas, the objectives of the Five Deeps Expedition, as the enterprise came to be known, or Vescovo’s love for the great depths: “The solitude reminds me of when I fly my helicopter visually and I’m not talking to air traffic control…I’m up there looking around not being bothered by anyone….Just me and my machine, going somewhere, exploring.” Vescovo gradually emerges as a complicated character, one moment expressing his strong ego and the next, the humility and respect that must be brought to extreme adventuring—and there’s plenty of adventure to be found here.
A vigorous tale of human ambition, technical challenge, and nervy attitude.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-676-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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