A sad story, movingly told. (8 pages b&w photos)
A dramatic debut in which Oldham relates the incredible tale of her sailing into, and surviving, Hurricane Raymond in 1983.
In September of that year, Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, departed Tahiti to deliver Hazana, a 44-foot ketch, to a couple in San Diego. On the 19th day of the voyage, 140-knot winds blew Richard overboard and capsized the boat. Forty-one days later, Oldham arrived in Hawaii alone, the Hazana mangled and mastless, with one small sail tied to the spinnaker pole. With the overwhelming death of her fiancé occurring in the first chapter, Oldham survives her solo adventure by retreating into her mind. Engaged just before leaving Tahiti, she remembers the happy scenes of their courtship: their first meeting in a California boatyard, sailing the South Pacific together, Kon Tiki Island, the pearl farm on the atoll Makemo, Bastille Day on Tahiti. Richard remains an idealization, always saying and doing the right thing. The mundane tasks of making it to Hawaii keep Oldham sane—she takes sextant readings, sails to the proper latitude, and budgets and savors her remaining food and water. She also begins having conversations with the Voice, an internal friend with a sense of humor and good advice that keeps her on course. Two months out of Tahiti, she is rescued just off Hilo, Hawaii, and given a fervent welcome from anxious family and reporters. It takes three beauticians two days to detangle her salt-matted hair. The owners of Hazana arrive and are stunned by the wreck of their boat (before and after photos are startling), and Oldham’s mother takes her home to California. A visit to Richard’s family in Cornwall, England, brings little comfort to anyone. Tami ends on a hopeful note with her marriage to Ed Ashcraft in 1992, the birth of their two daughters, and her seaside life on San Juan Island, Washington.
A sad story, movingly told. (8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: June 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6791-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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