A glib, charming take on a popular watersport.
A midlife crisis spurs an adventure writer to pursue surfing.
At 45, having just completed a mountain-climbing expedition in Tibet, Heller (The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals, 2008, etc.) was eager for a new adventure. He found it in Orange County, Calif., where a college buddy proposed that they learn to surf. Neoprene wetsuits and surfboards set the stage for a reckless, overconfident first attempt at Huntington Beach that went awry (“windmilling arms, big splashes”) and incited the ire of nearby seasoned pros who recognize a “kook” (beginner surfer) when they see one. Undeterred by bruising and exhaustion, Heller continued even after he’d abandoned the beach for several writing opportunities and returned three years later fortified with a healthy determination to become a skilled surfer in just six months. Though his restless lifestyle had made him romantically undesirable in the past, current girlfriend Kim agreed to join him and the pair married. Heller and his new wife soon became ensconced in the Southern California surfing community, then traveled to Mexico. However, their new adventures were tabled in favor of Heller’s participation in exposing the slaughter of whales and dolphins by Japanese fishermen. The author deviates from his waterborne exploits to opine on the state of surfing (a booming “billion-dollar industry”) and its diverse culture, and he notes that his time negotiating coastal waters afforded him the opportunity to assess the rapidly deteriorating state of West Coast beaches and coastal erosion. Negotiating riptides and surprise swells, Heller eventually developed a fresh appreciation for “the forces a surfer deals with” and, even as a neophyte, applauded their “prowess and grace.” “Surfers are an intense bunch,” he writes, “and they love their coast the way they love their mothers.”
A glib, charming take on a popular watersport.Pub Date: July 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9420-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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