The unaffected remembrances of an 18th-century mariner, eerie in their ability to make readers feel contiguous with the events, edited by Flannery (Throwim Way Leg, 1998, etc.). This is a remarkable memoir in that its author was neither famous nor infamous but a Common Joe who happened to attract the attention of a publisher interested in the lives of adventurers, to whom Nicol told his story. He was a sailor, though not, as Flannery puts it, “of the rum, sodomy, and lash school.” He was a ship’s cooper and candlemaker, intimate with the below-decks world of slaves, convicts, and Chinese barbers. With a solid reputation and a widely appreciated touch for brewing spruce beer, Nicol was routinely requested to join voyages, managing to twice circumnavigate the world, engage in trade and discovery and strife, find a wife and then lose her as he fled the press gangs. Nicol had an eye and an ear for the background music of the everyday, of language (though surely tidied by Flannery for today’s readers), and catches of verse and song or the work chant of West Indian slaves: “Work away, body, bo / Work aa, jollaa.” Equally appealing are his responses to wild landscapes—he doesn’t bother with the heroic, as in this on Greenland: “Desolation reigns around: nothing but snow, or bare rocks and ice. The cold is so intense and the weather often so thick. I feel so cheerless.” And an immediacy rings in the account, pulling you in. “The natives came on board in crowds and were happy to see us. They recognized Portlock and others who had been on the island before, along with Cook.” That’s Hawaii and that’s Captain Cook. This memoir has seen two printings in Great Britain, one in 1822 and another in 1937, and it appears here now for the first time, the lucky find of treasure hunters who discovered a gem worth far more than its weight in gold doubloons.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-755-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
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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