Next book

OCEAN COUNTRY

ONE WOMAN'S VOYAGE FROM PERIL TO HOPE IN HER QUEST TO SAVE THE SEAS

A moving testament to the human spirit.

A complex narrative of how journalist Cunningham (Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age, 1995) overcame despair through her conservation efforts.

In the mid-1990s, the author was recovering from a near-death experience after her whitewater kayak had been overturned by a rogue wave, rendering her temporarily unconscious. In the aftermath, she suffered problems with numbness in her body, debilitating pain, and the onset of an autoimmune disorder. For her, surfing in ocean water had been “her happy holiday,” a place where she experienced a profound connection to nature. After her accident, it was also the scene of her brush with death. To overcome her fear, she began training as a divemaster, but her health continued to deteriorate. In an effort to recuperate, she booked a diving trip to a group of islands off the coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The trip was glorious, but she became aware that this paradise was being threatened by pollution, that the seemingly invulnerable ocean was “much more vulnerable than it appeared.” Taking stock of the many ways in which humans were damaging the oceans—climate change, pollution, toxic chemicals, overfishing, oil spills, and others—Cunningham began to travel to oceans in other parts of the world, where she witnessed the destruction of coral reefs and vegetation that provide protection for shelter fish and other ocean dwellers. At first, the author was in despair. For her, the ocean had been a refuge and playground. Now her eyes were opened to the enormity of the threat. “I’d known about all of this for years,” she writes, “but it had been 'information.’ Now it was visceral, witnessed: I was horrified.” Cunningham regained her strength by joining the growing community of caring people around the world who are fighting to preserve our oceanic heritage, and she ably conveys her enthusiasm to readers.

A moving testament to the human spirit.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-58394-960-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: North Atlantic

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

Close Quickview