Next book

ROWING THE ATLANTIC

LESSONS LEARNED ON THE OPEN OCEAN

Bold and invigorating.

Former British businesswoman trades career and marriage for a solitary high-seas adventure.

Dedicated to “anybody who has a dream,” Savage’s chronicle begins in 2005 on the shores of the Canary Islands as the 38-year-old former London office worker methodically checks every detail of Sedna, her specially designed carbon-fiber rowboat, on the eve of the notoriously demanding Atlantic Rowing Race. As the contest’s first solo female entrant ever, Savage assesses her qualifications as mildly inadequate, given that she was “just under five-foot-four, with an unfortunate tendency to tubbiness.” However, she had prepared physically and mentally for 14 months for the two-to-four month journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Savage is an amiable, often humorous narrator, extolling the joys and the unforeseen pitfalls of going it alone on the open water. She shares memories of her former life as the increasingly disillusioned wife of a financial consultant, revealing the embarrassing exposure of her infidelity, and how the idea to enter the competition was born. Early in the event, Savage was plagued with doubts and uncertainty—sponsorship woes, internal skepticism—but it was the physical hurdles that affected her most as the long days and nights of rowing on windswept, surging ocean waters caused painful saltwater sores (rowing naked only helped so much), hand blisters, infected boils, fingernail separation and shoulder strain. The Atlantic, she writes, was “proving be a very challenging opponent.” Yet she continued undeterred while sharks and other impediments forced other contenders to stop. The author’s courageous success story is a testament to self-sufficiency, even if her reflections are occasionally clichéd—“anything is possible, and our only limits are the ones we place on ourselves.”

Bold and invigorating.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4165-8328-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview