Imperfect Passage: A Sailing Story of Vision, Terror, and Redemption by Michael Cosgrove-Book Review-Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Imperfect Passage: A Sailing Story of Vision, Terror, and Redemption by Michael Cosgrove

This is a great book and a thought-provoking story packed with humorous witticisms. Make no mistake about it, this book is an emotional rollercoaster ride.

I was 32 years old and my wife Jane was 28 when we went over the horizon on our own homemade 46-foot sailboat, Dursmirg. We only had one regret….we didn’t leave sooner. We fulfilled our dream many times over and our adventures generated four books.

Michael Cosgrove’s fast moving book awakened many unforgettable memories.

Imperfect Passage is worthy of more than five stars.

Excerpts:

Playing golf at eighty is not an attractive picture. I had played with some octogenarians before, so I was familiar with how that goes. Here’s a bit of science for you: men in their eighties are weak and slow.

At sixty, it dawned on me for the first time that longevity wasn’t so much a concern as the quality of life I would be experiencing in the years to come. The picture of myself doddering in a wheelchair with oatmeal dripping off my chin scared the hell out of me. Over and over in my head, I heard: “Boy, you only have fifteen, maybe twenty years left

Sheehy hadn’t bothered to write about the eighties, or perhaps that she simply couldn’t come up with a snappy phrase for them, basically said it all. The “Easy Eighties?” I think not. How about the “Aching Eighties.” The “Ehh, Sonnyboy Eighties.” The “Amen-It’s-Over Eighties.” Have to write those down and send them to Sheehy for her inevitable sequel, The Final Passage. I bought the damn book anyway and started taking notes:

I no longer needed to perform for others; I would answer only to myself. My new mantra would be, “Think young, stay young.” If you’re not busy living, you’re busy dying. Go out and live your dream.

“Why don’t they ever go?” “Lots of reasons. I’ve heard ’em all. We’re waiting for the kids to graduate. We’re waiting for Uncle Joe to die and leave us the inheritance. Best one I think I ever heard: we’re waiting for our cats to pass away.”

I’ve seen enough of both sides of the divide to know that money and material objects can destroy the soul. Opulence can wrench families apart, and even our middle-class values no longer sufficiently emphasize togetherness, family, neighbors, human relationships. By our standards, the Polynesians are poor, very poor. But, if you asked them if they feel poor, they would laugh and tell you they are not poor but happy, very happy, with the only way of life they have ever known. I have no statistics to support this supposition, but I am sure that, given the lower rate of stress, the Polynesian people live happier and longer lives than the folks back home in the Mecca of materialism, Orange County, California.

Each crossing got a little bit easier. I’ve always been a firm believer that you can’t do well what you don’t do often. It makes no difference what the activity—sailing across oceans, solving complicated math problems, or making love.

View my author's page on Amazon

Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson Book Review

 Book Review - Five Stars

Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson

This book review is somewhat disjointed because Hunter Thompson and his entire family were totally and continually blitzed out on high times dope.

When Hunter J. Thompson was buzzed in the 1970’s, and when the world was deeply divided, disillusioned, and dropping out was a way of life for those that could, my wife and I made a very timely escape. We were having the time of our lives living aboard our home built 46-foot dream boat Dursmirg, going where the wind blew, when the spirit moved us, and the price was right.

At that time Florida had four notorious anchorages where like minded boaters congregated, St. Augustine, Miami/Dinner Key/Coconut Grove, Marathon/Boot Key and Key West. Our friend Nira used to claim; “There are so many junkies in Monroe County (the Florida Keys), that you could become one by osmosis”

This is where we encountered Hunter J. Thompson, the drug fiend and mischief-maker. One Sunday evening a group of Bubba Schill’s friends gathered aboard his old Nova Scotia sailing schooner for his weekly one pot eating extravaganza. We were among them laughing, joking, and enjoying being down in the
Florida Keys… As usual it was a boisterous happy group. Suddenly there hanging on the gunnel of the sailboat was this strange dripping wet person wearing diving goggles. This person finally got our attention, and he exclaimed; “I screamed, hollered, and nobody would come and get me so I swam out.” This was the notorious Hunter J. Thompson!

I might add here; neither my wife Jane or I used any mind altering drugs except alcohol.

Read the book.  It is a real peek into the real world of that day and time, both enlightening and tragic.

EXCERPTS:

He was portrayed as such by Bill Murray in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam. In 1998 Terry Gilliam directed Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which, though it did capture more of the complexities of the book, still presented Hunter primarily as a drug fiend and mischief-maker. Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. He was first and always a writer in the best and highest sense of the iconoclast, more buffoon than satirist. He was portrayed as such by Bill Murray in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam.

In 1998 Terry Gilliam directed Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which, though it did capture more of the complexities of the book, still presented Hunter primarily as a drug fiend and mischief-maker.

Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. He was first and always a writer in the best and highest sense of the word, in which writing is a vocation, not an occupation. Everything else was secondary. Drugs, family, lovers, friends, sex, adventure, they all came after writing. And into his world I came in 1964, when he was twenty-seven, poor, and living in an unheated shack with his new bride.

The fact that at fourteen I was taking acid, and worse, that my mother was actively supporting it. I also remember hearing that someone once asked Hunter at a lecture how he would react if he found out his son had taken acid. He responded, “I’d beat the shit out of him.” I did not talk to Hunter about my drug use then or in fact ever. And he never asked. He didn’t want to know.

For all the progress we had made over the past eight or nine years, our relationship was still filled with tension and I was exceedingly wary of him. Though I didn’t hate him any longer, I was still angry with him for being so difficult, unpredictable, volatile, unreasonable, and selfish. He was often such a bastard.

View my author's page on Amazon

Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf - Book Review Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf

Portage is a wonderful collection of dream-fulfilling canoeing adventures commingling with nature and spiced with tidbits of historically enlightening information.

Sue Leaf and her husband Tom chose a good way of life...very satisfying and immensely rewarding while ecologically living with nature.

This is a great lesson plan for humanity to follow while reaping gratifying returns with positive self-sustaining rewards.

I loved all the chapters, but my favorite was when Sue shared her experiences canoeing the Bois Brule River in Douglas County, Wisconsin. I grew up near the Brule, and some of my earliest adventures were in a canoe on Brule.

Click here for a link to a chapter of one of my wild experiences on the Brule.

EXCERPTS from Portage by Sue Leaf

Mr. Ito had packed a book and a lawn chair and would spend the time on shore, but Bob and Joanne and I could paddle about to our heart’s delight. I rushed home to change into my swimsuit and get permission. I can still hear my father’s voice. “Oh, I don’t know, Susan Jean. That sounds like not a good idea. Too dangerous. Those canoes are tippy. What if you capsized?” “I can swim,” I pointed out. “I’d wear a life jacket. The Itos have life jackets. They’re required by law.” “Yes, you can swim,” he countered. “But can you swim in deep water? No, no, you can’t go. It’s just too dangerous.” My temper flared. This made no sense! The Itos weren’t foolish. They were very smart, in fact. All sorts of people paddled canoes without fear, without endangerment. I was not going to lose this opportunity. “Well, I don’t care. I’m going,” I declared.

I had the skill to be on the water, that normal people went out in canoes every day, that risk was involved in everything one does.

What amazes me even now is that this time there were no consequences. No one yelled when I got home. No one clobbered me. I wasn’t grounded. I lost no privileges. My parents and I must have reached a kind of détente that day,

How fortunate we sometimes are, the blind and naive young who operate without the benefit of experience. I realize now that I myself had been a canoe that day, cutting with ease through the water, swiftly gliding into my future.

“What is: the good life.” Never wanting more, never striving for more, never trying to accumulate stuff. Surely those seventeen-year-olds in Mr. Johnson’s classroom, at least two of them, saw even then the glimmer of wisdom when it is asked this way. The veracity of this statement is especially obvious when sitting in a canoe, making your way across sparkling blue water, with everything you will need for the night and the next morning stowed in Duluth packs wedged between thwarts. One’s needs and desires are bounded by what is, and surely it is good, beauty, and grandeur apparent at every hand.

View my author's page on Amazon

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy - Book Review Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy

Full Tilt is laced with cynical and thought-provoking witticisms and humorous observations. Dervla Murphy, a young Irishwoman struck off alone by bike in the dead of winter to mingle with the natives of countries from Ireland to India, eat their food, drink their drinks, and live as they did. She ventured off the main roads into remote villages, up high mountains, across parched deserts. She was at times hot, freezing cold, parched, drenched. and exposed to lepers, tuberculin, and all sorts of unvaccinated people. She was no stranger to heat strokes and dysentery.

Her indomitable Irish persistence saw her through.

In my long life I have only encountered two of these glib-tongued stand-alone personalities who were uniquely unforgettable and a treasure to know. Needlessly to say I loved the book and the author.

EXCERPTS:

For days I had been living in a state of permanent saturation from the waist down, so that the only sensible reaction was lots of rum and no fuss.

The excitement of approaching for the first time the sinister Iron Curtain. At each bend I looked eagerly for tangled masses of barbed wire, watch-towers manned by vigilant soldiers armed with machine-guns and binoculars, and alert policemen keenly observing every movement for miles around. But not one of these thrilling phenomena appeared and it was only when I saw a locked, five-foot high gate across the road that I realized I had arrived at the significant point.

Viewing the desk and reflecting that if I wanted to enter the spy business here was my chance to make away with a fine collection of vitally important seals.

Stamps on my passport are the only souvenirs that I can afford to collect, and I didn’t want to be cheated of this one.

The Bulgarian Embassy in London had issued me with a visa valid for only four days. Now this genial policeman, who spoke fluent English, took one look at the card, said that it was ridiculous, and issued me with a new visa entitling me to stay in Bulgaria as long as I wished! After which we sat by the stove and amiably discussed our two countries over glasses of brandy.

Nowhere did I see any evidence of extreme poverty and the average citizen – a cheerful, singularly unapressed-looking individual – appeared to be adequately clothed, housed and fed.

I am far too reactionary to regard ‘backward peasants’ as being ipsofacto in need of modernization; yet in fairness I must give my personal impression of that side of the Communist coin which is not popular among Western propagandists.

The citizens of these countries provide for their deprived brothers as generously as do the tax-paying citizens of a Welfare State and the disparity between the circumstances of the disabled of Persia and the disabled of Britain is no greater than that between the circumstances of the working men of the two countries: in fact it may well be less, though the distribution of funds is more haphazard. Also the Muslim method of providing ‘Social Services’ has the important virtue of maintaining a natural and humane link between individuals. It is obviously more desirable to have citizens giving to beggars voluntarily, out of compassion, rather than to have them grumbling paying taxes to an impersonal government which dispenses what is left, after its civil servants have been paid, to unknown sufferers who are mere names in a filing cabinet.

I must admit that it’s difficult to get adjusted to such a fetid atmosphere, in which one is always conscious of the power of money over integrity.

View my author's page on Amazon

1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman - Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman

This true story tells the tale of the end of three hundred oppressive years in Russia, and America and Russia’s entrance into a world military power struggle which neither were prepared for.

It is an era that should never be forgotten, but history lessons have a disgustingly short memory.

Political power is governed by the very best politicians that money can buy.

A very impressive and well documented book deserving of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

The next word they decoded gave them pause. It was “Mexico.” De Grey and Montgomery looked at each other. This was an odd country name to turn up in a wartime communication. For one thing, Mexico was neutral in this war, although its president was hardly a friend of the Allies and had good relations with Germany and Berlin. The next name they decoded was even more incongruous: “Japan.” In fact, it popped up several times in this first part of the dispatch. Japan had been on the side of the Allies since August 23, 1914—but, alarmingly, the dispatch was worded as if Tokyo were about to become Germany’s ally. Thoroughly worried, the two code breakers worked with fierce determination for the next two hours. What emerged was a secret message from Berlin to Washington in two parts. The first contained what they knew was a diplomatic bombshell: on February 1, Berlin informed its ambassador in Washington, Germany would resume its unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping.

German submarines, known as U-boats, had sunk merchant ships without warning, and without picking up survivors—making no distinction between cargo ships of enemy combatants such as Britain, France, and Russia, and neutral ships such as those from Holland, Spain, and America. All those ships unloaded cargo, including industrial goods and sometimes even ammunition, in Allied ports; all were therefore fair targets, in the German view. This ruthless approach to war,

While Europeans ruthlessly fought other nations for land and treasure, Americans did not—those holding this belief conveniently forgetting that, in the nineteenth century, the United States fought for land and treasure more than once: against various Native American tribes; against Mexico in 1844; and, that same year, very nearly against Britain over the Oregon Territory.

In 1915, the year that fighting on the Western Front was bogging down in stalemate and Russia was suffering its first major setbacks, Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. “Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, ‘You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours. Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance.

The American president said, a position London and Paris vehemently denied. From their perspective, the whole justification since August 1914 had been that they were the forces of civilization fighting against their opposite, while the Germans were ruthless and bloodthirsty Huns whose aggression and violations of international law knew no bounds.

January 22, 1917, also marked a milestone in American history. Wilson decided to deliver the speech before the Senate, the first time a president had done so since George Washington. Copies would be distributed to every major capital in Europe at the same time. He also did what no president had ever done, not Washington nor Jefferson nor Abraham Lincoln nor even Theodore Roosevelt: he explained why American leadership was essential to the world.

“peace without victory” an international catchphrase just as Wilson’s note of December 18 had done with “league of nations.” Editor Herbert Croly of the New Republic, the house organ of high-grade Progressiveness, was quoted as calling it the greatest event of his life. Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, told the president that “the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy. that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion.” It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, “among the Immortals.”

View my author's page on Amazon

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion By Jeff Guinn - Book Review

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion By Jeff Guinn

The Mexican/United States border has aggressive money/land grabbing opportunists, mostly political and corporate, on both sides each lacking human empathy. This has been ongoing through good times and bad. There might not be any good guys and the poor will always be the looser.

It has been said that it is far better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Also might is right.

An excellent history lesson and must read book.

Excerpts:

All of the major fighting took place on Mexican soil, and the better-equipped and -organized American forces prevailed.

Veracruz in Mexican history. In 1519, Cortez brought his invaders ashore there, launching three centuries of enslavement by Spain. Veracruz was where America landed many of its troops during a war that took half of Mexico’s territory. The French occupied Veracruz in 1864 as the first step in its Mexican conquest. The American arrival in 1914 was assumed to signal another full-fledged invasion. American military commanders in the field certainly thought so, and were surprised to receive orders to remain in Veracruz instead of next striking 230 miles west at Mexico City.

1847, Mexico was forced to negotiate a peace settlement the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, America came away with almost one million square miles of new territory that included all or part of what would become the states of California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, plus the Nueces Strip, which remained so uninviting that General William T. Sherman subsequently suggested that “we should go to war again, to make them take it back.”

In return for about half of its nation, Mexico received $15 million, plus the cancellation of another $3.25 million in American business claims. The country’s leaders did what they could for Mexican nationals who suddenly found themselves living in the United States.

German suggestion to Mexico of reclaimed land deliberately didn’t include California. That great prize was intended to lure Japan into a German alliance. Those two nations remained in an official state of war, but it would be ideal for the Germans if, as their unrestricted warfare throttled the Allies in Britain and Europe, Japan attacked California while Mexico assaulted Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Japanese officials would be reluctant to meet with representatives of Germany, but Mexico and Japan were friendly.

Japan might be convinced to change sides, especially if the Germans dangled California as a potential reward. The Germans considered Japan’s chances of taking California far superior to Mexico’s odds of regaining any portion of the other three states, but in any event those outcomes would not be Germany’s concern. It all hinged on Carranza, and, if the United States declared war on Germany, whether his enmity for America would incline him to accept the German offer.

American diplomats in Germany routinely accepted messages, including those in code, addressed from German officials to their nation’s diplomats in Mexico.

telegrams were initially sent to the State Department in Washington; officials there passed them along to the German ambassador and his staff, who used America’s Western Union to make the final transmissions to the German embassy in Mexico City. Zimmermann’s telegram was sent through both the Swedish and U.S. transatlantic cable systems.

German leaders enjoyed the irony of the U.S. helpfully transmitting a message intended against America’s best interests.

The Germans did not know that British intelligence regularly intercepted all telegrams sent over Swedish and American cables and that Britain’s agents had cracked the German code.

The headline in the New York World was representative: “MEXICO AND JAPAN ASKED BY GERMANY TO ATTACK U.S. IF IT ENTERED THE WAR.”

View my author's page on Amazon