A prepossessing account of all it takes to enter the hellacious solo race around the Southern Ocean called the VendÇe Globe and how to become a hero. Goss is a can-do guy. He wants to sail around the world, through the roughest seas. Without bluster, he gets on with it. He drums up money and a training boat. He delays his gratification without grumbling when his responsibilities on the home front so necessitate (mouths to feed, a family to love—that comes first), but he keeps his eyes on the prize. Here, in prose as trim as his vessel, he details what it took to finally get a crack at the VendÇe Globe—all the funding proposals, the design testing on shake-out runs——The trick was not to take life too seriously, always see the funny side and never let something brew up until it got out of proportion.” Then, during the race, a hurricane overtakes him; readers, sensing Goss’s reluctance to exaggerate, will appreciate how bad it is when he observes: “No time to tidy the reefing lines. I flaked out the staysail halyard and freed the clutch; couldn’t afford niceties.” The storm is threatening to eat him alive when he gets an SOS: 160 miles away, to windward no less, a fellow sailor is in peril. “The decision had been made for me a long time ago by a tradition of the sea. When someone is in trouble you help.” He miraculously saves his fellow sailor, performs unanesthetized surgery on his own elbow while his boat rolls about in heavy seas, and goes on to finish the race. Goss then turned his up-to-it spirit to writing this book, doing his best to tell the story well, professionally, and honestly and with verve. He pulls that off, too, just like finishing the VendÇe Globe, just like saving a life. Incredible. (16 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0607-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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