Fontenoy’s gift is for rowing, not writing.
Twenty-something rower Fontenoy chronicles her solo trip across the Pacific.
In 2003, the author became the first woman to row across the Atlantic alone, an adventure she described in Across the Savage Sea (not reviewed). Two years later, itching for a new challenge, she set out to conquer the Pacific, rowing from Peru to Polynesia. Here, she records the hardships and privations of that trip—they range from mundane (she forgot to bring a toothbrush) to grave (storms and sharks are constant threats). The most interesting sections detail the advance-work that made the trip possible; she spent a full year outfitting her boat, finding sponsors and visiting local schoolchildren to generate interest in her endeavor. But the challenges of fundraising pale in comparison to the trials and taunts of the mighty Pacific. Barnacles jam the boat’s rudder, and a horribly hot sun forces her to hide in a tiny, airless cabin every afternoon. Early on, she breaks a rib, and she’s beset with migraines and tendonitis for most of the trip. Fontenoy includes some wonderfully humanizing details about herself—amid her packets of dry food and her maps, she brought along a few feminine luxuries, like razors and lotion, because occasional cosmetic indulgences help her stay upbeat. She’s courageous on the open seas, but her writing is timid, and her ideas at times trite. Throughout, she weaves reflections on the meaning of happiness: Happiness is about doing the thing you have envisioned yourself doing—and so, at sea, she is happy. Happy, perhaps, but not deep. Occasionally, Fontenoy offers a lovely image—during a menacing storm, “the sea ground its teeth”—but on the whole, she offers neither the stylish prose nor the wise insights of seasoned nature and adventure writers.
Fontenoy’s gift is for rowing, not writing.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-55970-818-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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