Far from exemplary as a memoir, but Willcox raises important environmental awareness and celebrates Greenpeace exploits,...
Capt. Willcox recounts his environmental adventures at sea in this folksy memoir.
Though most adventure stories show the protagonist experiencing a transformation, Willcox remains the same from beginning to end. Adopted early in his life, the author grew up in a radical household, and his parents butted heads with such figures as Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Throughout his early years, Willcox dedicated himself to progressive causes and maritime activities, particularly sailboat racing. After 30 years captaining ships for Greenpeace and battling abusive corporations around the world, the author seems unwavering in his devotion to the planet. Instead of a textured character study, the author rattles off one seafaring tale after another. “I found myself in Peru, walking around on a dead baby whale with a tape measure in my hand,” begins a typical chapter. The prose is a hodgepodge of anecdotes, journal entries, documents, maps, and footnotes, and it is clear that co-author Weiss struggled to wrangle these meandering tales into a coherent book. But unlike the stereotype of the angry and single-minded activist, Willcox seems earnest and good-humored. After sailing more than 400,000 miles of ocean, the author could begin and end his book anywhere, yet he chooses a strong denouement: arrested by Russian authorities, Willcox and his crew were incarcerated for two harrowing months. Conditions in the prison were medieval, and he had no idea whether Vladimir Putin would grant amnesty for the “Arctic 30,” as his colleagues became known. They had to survive by the old Soviet mantra: “Don’t trust. Don’t fear. Don’t beg.” Willcox is a man of action, and his courage is clear, especially when fighting for such a voluntary cause. But a man without flaws makes for dull reading, and his epilogue fizzles.
Far from exemplary as a memoir, but Willcox raises important environmental awareness and celebrates Greenpeace exploits, which should inspire like-minded activists.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07954-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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