An entertaining adventure tale worthy of republication.
Republication of the real-time maritime adventures of the bestselling crime-thriller author.
In 1973, fed up with more than a decade in advertising and yet to finish the first of his 50 novels, Woods (Unnatural Acts, 2012, etc.) decided to take time off. He moved to a remote coastal area in Ireland, “an ideal place…[with enough] peace and quiet to make it very difficult to find an excuse not to write.” Instead, he tried his hand at sailing, connecting with the local sailing club and becoming quickly hooked, despite an early misadventure with a borrowed dingy in which a rapid incoming tide almost swamped his car. Undaunted, Woods purchased a 30-foot cruising yacht designed to his own specifications. Less than two years later, he had qualified for and entered the 1976 Single-Handed Transatlantic Race. Originally published in 1977, this then-debut memoir describes the author's two-year apprenticeship in the lore of the sea, from navigation to boat design, a journey that culminated in a hair-raising six-week solo, trans-Atlantic sail. Of the 125 boats that started in 1976, 36 dropped out and five sank, and there were two deaths by drowning. The author finished 63rd, an impressive accomplishment. In addition to frightening winds and other nasty weather, Woods’ challenges included disturbed sleep, diminishing food and water, a series of structural failings and mechanical problems. Solitude did not prove to be a serious problem, although he suffered from the hallucinatory experience of hearing a nonexistent phone ring.
An entertaining adventure tale worthy of republication.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-16111-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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 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
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