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
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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