Storandt paints a beckoning picture for the life he has chosen and now lives so well. (13 b&w photographs, 2 maps, 1...
A trim memoir of a man discovering his sexuality and a love of sailing in one, mostly serendipitous, turning.
By the time freelance writer Storandt decides to build a 33-foot cutter, the Clarity, he has decided upon the greater course of his life: the free expression of his homosexuality and a desire to spend as much of his earthly time aboard the boat exploring all the lands he can sail to. A graduate of Juilliard, grabbing part-time work here and there as was the manner in the late 1960s, Storandt moved with his girlfriend to northern Vermont to get a true taste of self-sufficiency and the rural pastoral, but was just as busy hiding his sexuality—yet increasingly drawn to it. It took him another decade to finally get it together to live as an openly gay man, and when he does, it comes as a gust of relief to the reader, for he had been fumbling around at the margins for so long. After the Clarity is built, with the usual financial ruination, he and his partner Brian—by now in a three-year relationship—ship out for a yearlong cruise down to the Lesser Antilles. Braided into this mix of coming-out and sailing stories is his and Brian's current adventure: sailing across the Atlantic to Brian’s native Scotland (with another chum, Bob). Storandt's writing has a comfortable ease to it, and plenty of self-deprecation for all his fussy worrying—how he can “savor and telegraphy every misery”—which works well for the easy passage over, but keeps the wicked gales they encounter heading north from the Azores to Scotland from becoming white-knuckle reading. And though he is strongest in expressing his joy of life with Brian, he can also draw a nifty descriptive passage on the water- and landscapes they pass through on their journey.
Storandt paints a beckoning picture for the life he has chosen and now lives so well. (13 b&w photographs, 2 maps, 1 line drawing)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-299-17460-3
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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