Don’t be surprised if tears of relief flood your eyes after finishing any number of these death-dealing stories.
Wonderfully suspenseful tales of air-sea rescue from Walker (Nights of Ice, 1997, etc.), a veteran chronicler of such acts of heroism.
Although the meat of this story is the rescue of fishermen from the sunken vessel La Conte, Walker sets the stage with a few chapters of rescue operations from the early years—a mere 20 years back—when chopper pilots and rescue swimmers counted prayer as their most valuable tool. Helicopters went down then in scary numbers, but this was the gig the Coast Guardsmen had signed on for, and it is because of their daring that what is practiced today as operational tactics were learned in the first place. Walker paints the history, geography, and citizenry of Alaskan fishing towns with great warmth and evocativeness, and then turns his attention to extreme weather in the Gulf of Alaska. It’s a triple-digit universe: waves over 100 feet, winds over 100 miles per hour, squall lines hundreds of miles in length. Unless you are in the maw of such a hellacious storm, the next most realistic thing is for Walker to describe it to you, especially a night storm, with rogue monster “pitch-black waves moving out of the pitch-black night,” then your boat slipping into the greasy depths of the trough, the air so thick with sea spray it is impossible to breathe. The La Conte never had any business in such weather, and she went down fast with no lifeboat, throwing the 5-man crew into the 40-degree drink in the middle of the night. Tethered together, they were found by a Coast Guard helicopter, but wound up spending more than seven hours in the water, through three separate helicopter missions. At one point, a helicopter was literally dodging waves, hovering at 80 feet to drop the rescue basket only to find a 100-foot monster coming down on them. Unfathomably, three of the fishermen were rescued.
Don’t be surprised if tears of relief flood your eyes after finishing any number of these death-dealing stories.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26971-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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