A swashbuckling maritime reminiscence with picaresque edges crafted by a gifted writer.
A young, intrepid adventurer escapes his quirky family to discover a life at sea in this Vietnam era memoir.
Emmy-winning filmmaker and author McCarey (Islands Under Fire, 2012) grew up yearning to escape the dankness and insularity of New York state’s Hudson Valley and the weirdness of his Irish family. His father, whom McCarey calls “the Artist,” was a ne’er-do-well, goldbricking cartoon illustrator and admirer of the “Prince Valiant” strip. The Artist influenced his son with his tales of ocean voyages that happened only in his own head. The author’s kleptomaniac mom, Maggie, taught him how to steal, cheat in school, and ditch class. He pervades this narrative of his call to the seafaring life with a wry and insightful awareness of his own and others’ foibles. Smart and capable but an academic disaster, McCarey decided to go to New York Maritime College, a decision celebrated by Maggie but scorned by the Artist: “He ranted about the waste of my ‘precious god-given talent.’ What talent? I wondered.” Replete with many literary references gleaned from his reading at sea during slack times, the author shows a love of sentence fragments that he deploys to great effect in the tales of his many merchant marine voyages, often to Vietnam, aboard rusty hulks shipping material to the war, which he calls “the Beast.” At one point, he becomes interested in the “intriguing hints of life below the water’s surface: A patch of ocean boiling with baitfish. The purple sails of Portuguese man-of wars drifting on the Gulf Stream or moon jellies pulsing in the South China Sea.” The terrifying dangers of loose munitions in the hold during a roiling ocean, his encounters with colorful characters both at sea and in ports of call, his telling observations of human nature, the mindless routine life aboard ship that McCarey finds amusing—all of this the author recounts with humor and an uncanny ear for speech. He uses various dialects, a stylistic habit that may not appeal to every reader. But this is a minor flaw for an author whose gift is rendering the stuff of life on the ocean into vivid and telling prose.
A swashbuckling maritime reminiscence with picaresque edges crafted by a gifted writer.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-889901-66-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The Glencannon Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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