The good guys wear white, the bad guys black in this oceanic opera, but the formula satisfies.
A former maritime reporter retells and updates the story of a disastrous sinking he covered for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Now an executive on Wall Street, Frump tries with uneven success to recover his journalist’s chops in this thorough but tendentious account of the Marine Electric, a WWII-era vessel carrying 24,000 tons of coal from Virginia to Massachusetts that broke up in a storm on Feb. 10, 1983. Conditions were so rough that 31 of the 34 officers and crew died in the frigid water before help arrived. Frump describes the ship (a rusty veteran with a myriad of structural problems that Marine Transport Lines Inc. neglected to repair), introduces the crew, and identifies a hero: chief mate Bob Cusik, who survived the sinking and distinguished himself on the witness stand during the subsequent hearings. Like their counterparts in Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, the owners’ sleek, shifty attorneys attempted first to rattle Cusik, then to discredit him, and finally to blame him. (Not to worry: he emerges victorious.) In a Melvillian move, the author tries to universalize his account with stories of other marine disasters, including the sinking of the Badger State during the Vietnam War and the 1964 loss of the Daniel Morrell, whose sole survivor suffered severe psychological trauma. Frump also intercuts scenes in the newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose reporters pursued the story with Woodward-and-Bernstein tenacity, and includes exchanges from the Marine Board of Investigation’s hearings, which produced another hero: Coast Guard Capt. Dom Calicchio, who suffered no fools gladly. An interesting epilogue reveals what the principals are doing nowadays and calculates the effects of the disaster on the Merchant Marine. Overall, it’s a gripping tale marred somewhat by clichés and overwriting, e.g., “To be free, he had to face his fear and listen to the song in his heart.”
The good guys wear white, the bad guys black in this oceanic opera, but the formula satisfies.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50116-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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