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
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
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