This recounting of a Pacific run aboard a merchant marine ship from boating journalist Allen may be prosaic, but it is also lulling, as if it had caught the rhythm of wide ocean swells. Recently married to the first mate of the Endurance, a Titanic-size containership, Allen elects to go along with him on his next assignment. They would ship out of Oakland, Calif., en route to the Far East, with stops in the Aleutians, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Okinawa, and other ports of call, then make a long pull back to Long Beach, Calif. Allen's log of the trip is interspersed with annotations, histories (both personal and maritime), port tours, details of the ship's Brobdingnagian architecture, and a taste of what it is like to work for the merchant marine. She recounts the brutal hours, the quarrels and differences between crew members, the travails of women mariners. Allen depicts a world in flux (though often ruled by protocols dating back to the Hanseatic League): The arts of celestial navigation and sea savviness—skills that tempted the officers to the sea in the first place—have been replaced by global positioning systems and computer printouts. Dismayingly, too, she makes clear that the US shipping industry is taking its last bows; now down to 298 ocean vessels, it's a victim (as Allen would have it) of union bloat and flags of convenience. The book is prey to the doldrums of shipboard life, but when Allen gets a chance- -recalling a brush with mean weather or the abuse a female engineer endured—she can write with powerful immediacy. Allen's voyage may not have been ``two years before the mast'' (seafarer Richard Henry Dana is a great hero of hers)—it was actually two months aft of the mast in a sixth-floor stateroom—but one leaves her book sensing she paints a genuine portrait. (20 b&w photos, map, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-882593-20-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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