by Robert Frump ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2002
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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