A blustery seafarer’s delight, rendered with gusto.
Prolific author and lecturer Tougias (Ten Hours Until Dawn, 2005, etc.) sets sail for another passionately recounted peril-at-sea adventure, this time adrift on the unpredictable waters of the Atlantic in 1980.
Located 100 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Georges Bank offers rich grounds for fishermen, but its deadly waves and currents keep many away. Brawny, seasoned Ernie Hazard, 33, knew these dangers well and frequently navigated the 50-foot steel lobster boat Fair Wind to that treacherous oval-shaped plateau. He’d prepped well for a season-ending trip in November 1980, setting out from Cape Cod amidst a promising forecast. Key reports from both Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine, however, were not available, due to malfunctioning buoys. Eighteen hours into the journey, stormy seas assailed the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever, another lobster boat sloshing along ten miles to the north. Both crafts were taken by surprise, and while their increasingly terrified crews engaged contingency plans, a slew of mayday signals from other boats closer to shore threw the Coast Guard into a frenzy. Faced with “a wall of water close to one hundred feet tall,” the Fair Wind capsized, pitching Hazard into 55-degree water. He managed to climb into the ship’s rubber life raft, where he began a three-day struggle for survival described here with excruciating intensity. Tougias also chronicles the equally desperate plight of the Sea Fever crew, as well as the two separate rescues. Additional information on weather patterns, area maps, the lobster industry, shark behavior, personal crewmember history, etc. is interesting enough, but it often feels like filler. Still, the padding only slightly detracts from the author’s enthusiastic delivery.
A blustery seafarer’s delight, rendered with gusto.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9703-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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