This tale of adventure on the high seas is gripping at times but generally slight and rambling.
In Catalano’s semiautobiographical novel, a young college professor sets sail through the Middle East in the 1980s.
Protagonist and narrator Joe Pisano is a college professor and yachting enthusiast, much like Catalano (Music and Literature/Pace; Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter, 2000). As the novel opens, Pisano is sailing through calm waters with his friends, playing captain with histrionic panache. A self-professed romantic, his head is filled with maritime literature. One of the novels strengths is Pisano’s enthusiastic narration, which slides between self-deprecation, naïveté and hypersensitivity. Describing these early, easy sea travels, Pisano quips: “My guests, who referred to me as ‘Captain,’ seemed to enjoy my exaggerated storytelling, but they enjoyed the refreshments and swimming more than anything else.” Then Pisano gets a call to participate in a real sailing adventure: A crew circumnavigating the globe needs an extra crewmember from Cairo to Milan. Before he can quote Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” Pisano is on a plane. Once in the Middle East, he finds only disillusion: The boat is in terrible shape; fellow crewmembers, Roger and Dick, are silently disgruntled on their best days; and the sailing is a monotonous cycle of terrible weather, run-ins with bandits and hard labor. Some of the episodes, like an encounter with a dock full of treacherous-looking gunmen, live up to the standards of classic sea-faring adventure literature. Readers may wish all aspects of the novel exhibited the same attention to detail the author reserves for exploring his protagonist’s inner life. Roger and Dick are sketchily drawn, and most of Pisano’s interactions with them fail to deepen their characters; readers may long to hear their perspective, but it never comes. Catalano rarely explains boating vocabulary for the layman so boating novices will find certain parts of the novel hard to fathom. What is “the gelcoat of the freeboard” and how does a storm wreak havoc upon it? The adventure ends with a rather spectacular scene near Libya, but the novel’s overall lack of depth dulls the adventure.
This tale of adventure on the high seas is gripping at times but generally slight and rambling.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615556963
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Aegeon Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
