Introspective and enlightening, Clark’s seafaring memoir offers a rare glimpse into the solitary worlds of sail and surf.
One woman takes to the waves on a journey of self-discovery.
Named by a surfing magazine as one of the “World’s Most Committed Surfers,” Clark chronicles how she captained her own boat in the pursuit of big water. She had considered going pro while majoring in environmental studies in college, but she found the pressures of competing disagreeable and dreamed instead of pursuing “more nature-saturated surf experiences.” Soon after finishing her undergraduate studies, the author received a happy windfall in the form of a 1966 Cal 40, a seaworthy 40-foot sailboat given to her by a dear mentor, a retired professor who was seeking to travel vicariously through her. Preparations to rig Swell for its new, 5-foot-4-inch, 110-pound captain took more than two years before Clark set sail from southern California, heading down through Baja and over to the South Pacific. “To the north: light, familiarity, comfort, safety, family. To the south: dark, unknown, doubt….It’s not the rogue waves or pirates I’m worrying about—it’s the thought of failure,” she writes, revealing her quest to be as much an interior journey as one driven by the desire to experience remote parts of the world. While for Clark “there’s nothing like the sensation of skittering down a water mountain,” much of her account centers on the trials and rewards of commandeering her own boat—from reckoning with unforgiving elements and near-constant equipment failures to navigating the challenges of being a woman traveling solo in the male-dominated world of cruisers—i.e., those “living and travelling on small boats for extended periods of time.” Throughout, the author clearly, if unexceptionally, describes her many experiences at sea and at more-and-less idyllic South Pacific ports of call, and she relies on copious color photos to set the stage and spark the “imagination” as to “what is possible.”
Introspective and enlightening, Clark’s seafaring memoir offers a rare glimpse into the solitary worlds of sail and surf.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938340-54-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Patagonia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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