Entertaining as armchair adventure, and a useful primer for anyone seeking to find a fortune beneath the waves.
A vigorous account of modern-day treasure hunting.
First-time author Jessop, writing with maritime journalist Hanson, began his career as a diver as a means of escaping the poverty of his North of England youth just after the end of WWII; hauling up sunken barges and pleasure craft and selling the wreckage for scrap, he realized, could earn him a thousand quid a year, “the sort of money that only bosses made.” More important, he writes, it made him “a free man,” one of the few in his grim industrial town who was not a wage slave in a mine or factory. After learning his craft in Yorkshire’s murky lakes and rivers, Jessop made for the open sea, where he acquired skill and considerable renown by recovering military vessels destroyed in battle and storm, among them galleons of the Spanish Armada. His successes, he writes, were the result not only of his skill in operating diving equipment and setting explosives, but also of his ability to ferret information out of his fellow working-class fishermen, who would “point out sites where they’d lost lobster-pots, a good indicator of something unusual on the sea-bed.” Jessop later turned his sights on British military craft sunk farther off the coasts of England, including the Chulmleigh, which carried a huge cargo of metal, and the Edinburgh, the grand prize, a destroyer that sank in the Barents Sea with a hold full of gold evacuated from the Soviet Union during the German advance on Moscow. Jessop eventually found both craft, finding that the Chulmleigh had already been looted but that the Edinburgh still carried its fortune. His account is full of clichéd true-adventure twists and turns, but few readers will be prepared for the harrowing finale of Jessop’s tale of finding the Edinburgh’s lost gold—one involving not sharks or swells but ravenous agents of the Inland Revenue.
Entertaining as armchair adventure, and a useful primer for anyone seeking to find a fortune beneath the waves.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-40733-X
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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