A quick-witted, humorous, and inspiring account of a couple’s six-year sea adventure.
After a brush with cancer, a lawyer sets sail with her husband to circumnavigate the globe in this debut memoir.
Farrow-Gillespie had long dreamed of sailing around the world. After her breast cancer went into remission, the 38-year-old attorney and her doctor husband, Alan, quit their jobs, sold their home, put their possessions in storage, and purchased a boat. They had the vessel shipped to America all the way from Taiwan. Together, they spent the next six years crisscrossing the globe on the Heartsong III, beginning and ending in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Along the way, the couple visited more than 50 countries, wandered around Dubrovnik, traversed the Strait of Gibraltar, explored Fiji, and encountered a subculture of fellow circumnavigators who shared a taste for adventure. For Farrow-Gillespie and her husband, the trip was born of a desire to “see the world—not just for two vacation weeks at a time—but to really see it, and to sail across all of the oceans on the way.” Early on, while Alan slept and the author was navigating in the Bermuda Triangle, they had a seemingly close encounter with a freighter. Readers discover that Farrow-Gillespie passed the exam for the United States Coast Guard charter captain license at the top of her class. One of the dictums she learned was “He who has the tonnage makes the rules.” Some chapters take the form of logbook entries—as in their final trek across the Atlantic—while most are prefaced with a kind of FAQ section, which serves as a guide for readers planning their own sailing trips around the world. For instance, as to the question of whether pirates are still out there, the author writes: “Why yes there are. We’re still probably a whole lot safer at sea than on a Dallas freeway, though.” Letters to friends at home are interspersed throughout. The mix of formats and the author’s colloquial tone make this book a pleasant read. Farrow-Gillespie writes movingly about her “love affair with the sea.” Her and Alan’s trip is filled with moments of quiet beauty and contemplation on the open water. She is also frequently funny. During a Caribbean swim, her “reverie is interrupted by the sight of a dorsal fin at about 50 yards, coming straight at me. I do a fair imitation of Bugs Bunny walking on water back to the boat’s swim ladder, and then realize that it is not a shark but a dolphin.”
A quick-witted, humorous, and inspiring account of a couple’s six-year sea adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-5741-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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