Thorpe’s maiden voyage as an author is wholly absorbing and completely irresistible.
Thorpe’s firsthand account of his experience as a crewmember on the Viracocha, a boat made of reeds that sailed the 2,000 miles from Chile to Easter Island.
At the dawn of the new millennium, professional adventurer and Thor Heyerdahl fan Phil Buck was on the shores of Lake Titicaca overseeing the finishing touches to a reed boat christened the Viracocha (another name for Kon-Tiki). No flimsy raft, the Viracocha was 60 feet long, had two masts, and was a masterwork of pre-Incan–style workmanship created by a local family who specialized in the traditional craft; Buck planned to sail her to Easter Island in a further exploration of Heyerdahl’s theories. Thorpe, a wandering Scottish journalist with a very understanding wife, stumbled across the project and, immediately enchanted, lucked into a space onboard. The account that follows, told in his addictive, self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek style, is nearly unbelievable, from the trials of actually getting the boat launched to the final moments of the Viracocha at Easter Island. Once underway, the craft practically sailed herself for much of the journey. A good thing, as the electronics and generating system failed, one right after the other, and the sails were a pure experiment (they had been created by Thorpe himself in the absence of anyone with greater knowledge of sail craft—he had none, either, but had nothing else to do before the expedition launched). Despite the capricious nature of the voyage, the almost staggering lack of experience of the crew, and the constant presence of sharks, most of the drama comes from the interaction of the eight men and their duck mascot, together 24 hours a day for a month and a half.
Thorpe’s maiden voyage as an author is wholly absorbing and completely irresistible.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1928-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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