An entertaining, true coming-of-age adventure about a courageous group.
College buddies decide to re-create Huck Finn’s trip down the Mississippi in Zalesny’s memoir.
Zalesny was a student at Loyola University in Southern California in the late 1950s when a professor wondered if anyone was interested in sailing down the Mississippi River just as Huckleberry Finn did in Mark Twain’s novel. An enthusiastic group of six came up with a plan for their summer break. Inspired by Twain and the recent documentary Kon-Tiki (1950), the friends built raft models and tried them out in the bathtub. Satisfied they could meet the challenge, the “River Rats” headed out onto Route 66, ending up in Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown of Mark Twain. The boys built their raft out of wood and oil drums, with a lean-to covered in a tarp for shelter. Barely floating but helped by an outboard motor, they set off on the treacherous river hoping to reach New Orleans, with storms, barges, and waves threatening the trip and their survival. They were also concerned about segregation and racism in the South; one member of the group was Latino and another Japanese American. Zalesny’s memoir captures the innocence and the sense of adventure of its young crew while always remaining aware of the difficulties of such an ambitious undertaking. With six egos on a small raft there was a lot of bickering, and in terms of the narrative, some characters aren’t developed as well as the others. But despite their slow progress, they were determined to succeed. Zalesny stays true to the realities of this excursion, which is a dirty, muddy, and dangerous affair. One of many involving passages highlights the infamous, cursed quasi-island that is the southernmost town in Illinois. (“Cairo was dying a slow lingering death; its prolonged death rattle was practically obscene.”) It didn’t all go according to plan, but their collective achievement is worth the read.
An entertaining, true coming-of-age adventure about a courageous group.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66291-916-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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