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
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
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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