A funny, irresistibly offbeat tale about the risks and rewards of living, and loving, with an open heart.
A charming memoir of how an Australian woman with a neurotic fear of the ocean set sail across the Pacific with her Argentinian lover.
Graphic artist DeRoche came to San Francisco from Melbourne to accomplish three things within a period of one year: “leave [her] comfort zone, work in a foreign city [and] enjoy some uninhibited fun.” A few months after she arrived, she found herself head over heels in love with Ivan, an Argentinian man she met in a bar. Tall and handsome and, as she found out later, hopelessly clumsy, Ivan had plans to sail his small boat, Amazing Grace, around the world the following year. DeRoche loved that Ivan could dream big, but she hated the ocean and all the “creepy crawly wet things.” For almost half a year, Ivan tried to persuade her to come with him, while the author looked for every possible way that the trip could go wrong. Afraid of dying at sea, but even more afraid of losing the man she realized was the love of her life, she took the plunge and traveled with Ivan “into oblivion.” They sailed to the Marquesas, Society and Cook islands, where they encountered bewitching tropical landscapes, generous natives and other “ocean gypsies” like themselves. But bad storms, equipment failure and leaks that almost sank the Amazing Grace caused DeRoche to finally abandon the voyage in Tonga and leave Ivan to finish the journey alone. The ending to this love story is still a happy one, though, since, once apart, both realized that a life spent testing limits together was the best adventure of all.
A funny, irresistibly offbeat tale about the risks and rewards of living, and loving, with an open heart.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4195-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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