A lively and enthusiastic surfing account.
A surfer recalls a calamitous road trip to Mexico with two cohorts in this debut memoir.
“There were two classes of residents: Those who had surfed mainland Mexico, and those who wanted to,” remarks Wilson regarding “The Manor,” a San Diego, California, surfing community. In the summer of 1978, the author snatched the opportunity to take a road trip to do just that. A self-confessed “hanger-on,” Wilson, nicknamed “Paul E. Opters,” was roped into the trip by “Moose” and “Jelly,” two esteemed surfers, because he owned a vehicle. The three 20-somethings packed the author’s Volkswagen bus to the brim and headed south for the border, but not before it was revealed that Moose was skipping bail to go to Mexico. The bus took the travelers through Tijuana before following the Baja Norte coastline to La Paz, where a perilous ferry crossing to Puerto Vallarta brought them closer to the surf paradise of La Ticla on the Mexican mainland. The trip was punctuated with disaster, mostly linked to Wilson’s unreliable and ironically nicknamed “Wonderbus.” The author also recalls a chance meeting with the infamous drug cartel leader El Chapo. On arrival at La Ticla, the author evocatively describes the group’s time spent surfing and living in a palm frond beach shelter called a palapa. The location is observed distinctly through a surfer’s eye: “La Ticla is a classic point break, a bulge in the coastline formed by countless cycles of muddy storm water pouring into the ocean via the arroyo, the debris settling to the bottom.” Surfing enthusiasts may be disappointed to find that only a fraction of the memoir captures the joy of the sport, preferring to focus on the minutiae of the road trip. Moments of extreme tension are recounted with high energy, but this approach is occasionally overused: “How can my mouth be so dry and my skin so wet? Damn, it’s quiet. I don’t remember the fluorescent lights humming before. Check my watch again. 12:43. You’ve got to be kidding me.” Illustrated with Wilson’s photographs throughout, this fun read captures a bygone age of surfing life and will be of interest to anyone who loves the West Coast scene.
A lively and enthusiastic surfing account. (map)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2019
ISBN: 14.99
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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