An entertaining adventure tale worthy of republication.
Republication of the real-time maritime adventures of the bestselling crime-thriller author.
In 1973, fed up with more than a decade in advertising and yet to finish the first of his 50 novels, Woods (Unnatural Acts, 2012, etc.) decided to take time off. He moved to a remote coastal area in Ireland, “an ideal place…[with enough] peace and quiet to make it very difficult to find an excuse not to write.” Instead, he tried his hand at sailing, connecting with the local sailing club and becoming quickly hooked, despite an early misadventure with a borrowed dingy in which a rapid incoming tide almost swamped his car. Undaunted, Woods purchased a 30-foot cruising yacht designed to his own specifications. Less than two years later, he had qualified for and entered the 1976 Single-Handed Transatlantic Race. Originally published in 1977, this then-debut memoir describes the author's two-year apprenticeship in the lore of the sea, from navigation to boat design, a journey that culminated in a hair-raising six-week solo, trans-Atlantic sail. Of the 125 boats that started in 1976, 36 dropped out and five sank, and there were two deaths by drowning. The author finished 63rd, an impressive accomplishment. In addition to frightening winds and other nasty weather, Woods’ challenges included disturbed sleep, diminishing food and water, a series of structural failings and mechanical problems. Solitude did not prove to be a serious problem, although he suffered from the hallucinatory experience of hearing a nonexistent phone ring.
An entertaining adventure tale worthy of republication.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-16111-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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