A blustery seafarer’s delight, rendered with gusto.
Prolific author and lecturer Tougias (Ten Hours Until Dawn, 2005, etc.) sets sail for another passionately recounted peril-at-sea adventure, this time adrift on the unpredictable waters of the Atlantic in 1980.
Located 100 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Georges Bank offers rich grounds for fishermen, but its deadly waves and currents keep many away. Brawny, seasoned Ernie Hazard, 33, knew these dangers well and frequently navigated the 50-foot steel lobster boat Fair Wind to that treacherous oval-shaped plateau. He’d prepped well for a season-ending trip in November 1980, setting out from Cape Cod amidst a promising forecast. Key reports from both Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine, however, were not available, due to malfunctioning buoys. Eighteen hours into the journey, stormy seas assailed the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever, another lobster boat sloshing along ten miles to the north. Both crafts were taken by surprise, and while their increasingly terrified crews engaged contingency plans, a slew of mayday signals from other boats closer to shore threw the Coast Guard into a frenzy. Faced with “a wall of water close to one hundred feet tall,” the Fair Wind capsized, pitching Hazard into 55-degree water. He managed to climb into the ship’s rubber life raft, where he began a three-day struggle for survival described here with excruciating intensity. Tougias also chronicles the equally desperate plight of the Sea Fever crew, as well as the two separate rescues. Additional information on weather patterns, area maps, the lobster industry, shark behavior, personal crewmember history, etc. is interesting enough, but it often feels like filler. Still, the padding only slightly detracts from the author’s enthusiastic delivery.
A blustery seafarer’s delight, rendered with gusto.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9703-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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