Some readers will admire Willis’s courage; others will lament his foolhardiness. All will be vastly entertained.
Was William Willis, who went rafting across the Pacific alone in 1954, the avatar of today’s extreme sports aficionados—or simply out of his mind?
Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Pacific crossing in a balsa raft, immortalized in his classic documentary Kon-Tiki, inspired numerous imitators. In his first nonfiction foray, novelist Pearson (Glad News of the Natural World, 2005, etc.) refers to Heyerdahl and such subsequent transoceanic rafters as Alain Bombard, Eric de Bisschop and DeVere Baker, but his narrative concentrates mainly on the life and adventures of William Willis, who died in 1968 attempting a solo crossing of the Atlantic at age 75. The wonder is that he lived so long. German-born Willis began his seagoing life as a 15-year-old deck boy. He jumped ship in Texas two years later and spent nearly two decades roaming across America, in 1926 winding up in Manhattan and educating himself at the New York Public Library. Through the years, Willis held more than 50 jobs and authored books and poems all of which were rejected by publishers. In 1938, he traveled to the notorious Devil’s Island and successfully freed a prisoner, the son of his Manhattan landlady. This incident offered a preview of the impulsiveness, bad planning and almost criminal negligence that characterized Willis’s decision at age 60 to cross the Pacific on a raft, simply to see if he could do it. Miraculously, he did it twice. These voyages, during which everything but the result went wrong, form the heart of Pearson’s look at a man whose odd dietary notions, novel fitness regimen, frugal lifestyle and almost mystical belief made him a crackpot by most 1950s estimates.
Some readers will admire Willis’s courage; others will lament his foolhardiness. All will be vastly entertained.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33594-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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