Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, by Thor Heyerdahl

In April 1947, six men crossed the Pacific Ocean on a balsa log raft, covering 4,300 miles (the distance from Chicago to Moscow) in 101 days.  They battled storms, sharks, killer reefs, and other disasters as they were carried along by the trade wind and the Humboldt Current from Peru to Polynesia.

Why would anyone do such a thing?  As a graduate student in zoology and anthropology at the University of Oslo, Thor Heyerdahl lived for a time on the Polynesian island of Fatu Hiva, collecting animal specimens.  He became fascinated by the island’s gigantic stone statues, which are similar to ones found in Peru, and by the ancient stories told of Kon-Tiki, the ancestral chief of the Polynesians who came over the ocean “from a mountainous land in the east.”  The deeper he delved, the more convinced he became that Polynesia had indeed been settled from the east rather than from the Melanesian and Asian islands to the west, as most scholars contended.

When he wrote up his findings and his theory, no one would publish it.  The seemingly insurmountable obstacle was that the ancient Peruvians had no boats.  However, as Heyerdahl knew, they did have rafts made of giant balsa logs, because many drawings of such rafts had been made by early European explorers.

“Well, you can try a trip from Peru to the Pacific islands on a balsa-wood raft,” was the sarcastic response of one scholar to Heyerdahl’s manuscript, and this stubborn, modern-day Viking decided to take up the challenge.  He traveled into the jungles to fell the logs, floated them down river to the sea, lashed them together using only the technology available to the ancient people, and sailed forth from the coast with five dauntless fellow Scandinavians.

Heyerdahl’s understated style, which recalls that of the early Norse sagas, is perfect for this gripping tale, and the humor with which he describes the discomforts and dangers of the voyage illustrates how the six bore the journey psychologically as well as physically.  Their encounters with the incredible sea life in the unexplored waters around them is part of the adventure, as well as how they fared once they reached the islands.

The original raft is in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, and the recent film of the story has won numerous awards in the author’s native Norway.  The English version is now out in the theatres, and you can read about it here.  Don’t miss the book, but be prepared—you’ll be up late till you finish it, and through Heyerdahl’s amazing descriptions you might start to feel the mighty heave of the waves and taste the warm, salty breeze!

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Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Let me begin by saying that I love this book! Graceling by Kristin Cashore is a young adult fantasy novel that features fantastic characters and a plot that moves along quickly, taking the reader with it as the characters experience love and death, friendship and betrayal.

The book takes place in a world where some people are born with a special talent called a Grace. Your Grace might be for cooking, climbing trees, or for healing horses. Unfortunately for Katsa, her Grace is for killing. Her uncle is one of the kings of this world and he has her trained and raised to be his own enforcement agent, sending her to exact revenge on anyone who crosses him. Secretly, however, Katsa uses her skills to help those who are in trouble.

On one such mission she meets Po, a young man who has a secret Grace. They team up to find out who has kidnapped Po’s grandfather, and why. This leads to travel, adventure, love, and loss. Everything is here in this fast-moving story that features a fiercely independent heroine and a likeable hero.

Graceling isn’t perfect. Some of the plot twists are obvious from a mile away. And, Katsa and Po often seem much younger than their ages (18-20 years), while another character named Bitterblue seems much older than her ten years.  But these are just quibbles.

Once you dive into this book, you won’t want to come up for air until the last page.

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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The first sentence of The Old Man and the Sea is Ernest Hemingway at his best. The sentence is crisp and clear, and it sets the tone for the entire novel. Hemingway wasn’t old when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, but the story is told by a mature author and by a man who had seemed knocked out after Across the River and into the Trees, the not so great comeback novel of 1950. Hemingway got up on “Nine” and in The Old Man and the Sea, he was once again writing a spare, complex story that had a measurable and profound impact on literature.

Long gone were the paragraphs of his youth, paragraphs that seemed plain on the surface but that were quite involved and the work of an ambitious modernist, and exorcised was the period of heavy writing that seemed hung-over. Hemingway once said that all he ever wanted was to write well, and in The Old Man and the Sea, he did just that.

And the story is so straightforward and poignant that it seems near-archaic – it has the authority of myths and legends while it is also deals with the realities of the fisherman’s life in an awe-inspiring manner. The world may be brutal and bleak but life can still be lived with dignity. “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

When Hemingway finally decided to publish The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the manuscript had been ready for almost a year. The author had been hesitant to publish it, as he believed it to be part of the great (never realized) Sea Book that he could not quite make right. But the tale had been part of the Hemingway’s life since the 1930s, when he had heard the real-life story of “an old man fishing alone in the skiff far out of Cabanas.” In a piece for Esquire in 1936, Hemingway described how a great marlin pulled the skiff far out to sea, and two days later “the old man was picked up by fishermen sixty miles to the eastward, the head and the forward part of the marlin lashed alongside.”

The Old Man and the Sea turned out to be the final novel published during Hemingway’s lifetime. It was a worthy ending.

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Albert of Adelaide by Howard Anderson

Every once in a while, it’s nice to read something different, the type of book that one doesn’t usually read. Albert of Adelaide is decidedly different, and probably not like anything that most people usually read, because it is such an unusual novel. This debut novel is fun, full of adventure, and is about a platypus named Albert who escapes from the zoo in Adelaide and heads into the Australian outback looking for a place called “Old Australia.” Yup, that certainly sounds like a different kind of novel, but despite being different, it’s definitely still worthwhile.

That also happens to be one of the main lessons in this story – that just because someone is different, it doesn’t mean that they are bad. Albert’s journey brings him to an odd world with creatures who judge and mistrust him because he’s different from them. His early life was traumatic. His mother was attacked by a wild dingo when he was very young and Albert was captured and put in the Adelaide zoo. This is where he first hears rumors of a mythic and strange place called “Old Australia” where the many different species of animals live in peace and harmony. He was able to escape and hops a ride on the South Australian Railroad traveling north of Alice Springs to the outback.

Albert meets a wombat named Jack, who befriends him and teaches his some of the basics of survival in the desert. The two friends get into some trouble at a local pub and trading post when Albert gets very drunk and becomes very lucky at a game of chance. To escape Jack sets fire to the place and he and Albert are soon on the run with the kangaroo proprietor and other local animals posting wanted posters for Albert’s capture. Despite the fact that they’ve become good friends, Jack and Albert split up figuring it will be safer for each and Albert soon meets a new friend, TJ, a raccoon from California. Their friendship works well because they are both animals not native to the outback. Other creatures that Albert meets along his journey include two drunken bandicoots named Alvin and Roger, a mean and thieving pair consisting of a wallaby called Bertram and a possum named Theodore, assorted dingoes, and the Famous Muldoon, a Tasmanian devil. Muldoon and Jack were close friends and traveling companions once, but Jack’s pyromania led to their separation eight years ago.

Themes of friendship, revenge, survival, loss and self discovery are set against the backdrop of Albert’s journey across the outback desert. The story alternates between scenes of action (including many fight scenes and a huge shoot out at the end) and those of survival in the harsh environment and contemplation of life in a strange place among strange animals. In the end, Albert has come a very long way from where he started, both geographically and metaphysically.

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Lower River by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux, author of Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cape Town to Cairo and many other novels and travel narratives, has written a taut and tense story about sixty-something Ellis Hock. Having spent forty years minding the family haberdashery before and since his father’s death while marrying and raising a daughter, Ellis now finds himself single after his wife discovers his emails to a variety of women. While the messages aren’t erotic, they reveal a certain intimacy of thought with women who had shopped in his men’s clothing store. After the divorce, he’s lonely and realizes he has been for a long time, remembering only one truly happy period of his life: his four years in the Peace Corps teaching in a tiny Malawi village.

Ellis decides to fly to Africa with an open-ended ticket, intending to stay several weeks and visit Malabo. On his arrival, he discovers the village has changed, and for the worse. The elders are mostly dead with only one or two people left who remember his years with them building a school and teaching in it. The village’s headman is a seemingly pleasant fellow in his thirties, but Ellis is canny enough to realize he is welcome to stay only because of his satchel of money which he hands out in dribs and drabs. Days go by with things promised by the headman not done and when Ellis decides to leave, his attempts to depart the isolated village are thwarted at every turn and take a decidedly sinister turn.

This novel is an interesting picture of cultural differences, and though Ellis is aware how the villagers think from his previous experience, there is no meeting point with them. He is viewed by the poverty stricken locals as a source of riches and always as an outsider. If you’re thinking of retiring to a cheap foreign locale, read this book.

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Dauntless by Jack Campbell

This is one of the best Military Sci-Fi / Space Opera books that I’ve read in quite some time! It’s filled with excellent science behind the fiction, great characters, and concepts. Author John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, has a regular feature called “The Big Idea” where authors of new SF books explain the big concepts behind their books. I kept imagining Jack Campbell (whose real name is John G. Hemry) explaining the “big ideas” in Dauntless; there are at least three that seem obvious to me:

1) Captain John “Black Jack” Geary is rescued from hibernation sleep in a survival pod in deep space after a century of drifting. He was the hero of the battle at the very beginning of the now century old war, and the memory of him (everyone believed he died heroically fighting off the Syndicate) has grown into myth and legend. Now, circumstances are such that he must lead the Alliance fleet in a time vastly different from what, to him, was just weeks or months ago. Geary has quite a lot to adjust to, and also tries to re-introduce some ideas and practices from his era.

2) Campbell is the first SF author I’ve ever read to write about the relativistic effects of light travel and distance from other ships, stars, planets, etc. In other words, what one “sees” from the ship is minutes or hours old based on far away one is. We know that the light reaching the Earth is about six minutes old, so if a big, powerful spaceship was that far away, we wouldn’t know that they had launched weapons at us until six minutes after the fact. The same is true for communication between ships. Campbell does an excellent job of handling this complication in a very intelligent, yet understandable, manner.

3) Even in the far future, when humankind has spread amongst many hundreds of star systems and has developed two different methods of faster than light inter-stellar travel, our greatest enemy – the one we’ve been fighting for over a century – is still … mankind. The Alliance is made up of those star systems ruled democratically and the Syndicate worlds are those ruled by dictators who control their population through fear. There are a few brief, vague hints that there may be non-human intelligent life out there, but there has never been any proof and never any encounters – at least not on the Alliance side. I also enjoy the fact that in most military sci-fi, including this one, the main characters do not relish war or killing for its own sake, and mourn those lost in battle.

I’m definitely hooked on the Lost Fleet series of military sci-fi, and can’t wait to see what else Campbell does with “Black Jack” Geary and the rest of the “lost” Alliance fleet as they try to make their way home from deep inside Syndic space. In a way this book reminds me a bit of the Battlestar Galactica re-boot TV series. It’s a whole fleet ships, searching for home, with a tired, war-weary commander and a civilian Co-President representing the Alliance government.

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Greatest Hits: A Dog’s Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin

This week we’re featuring some of our “greatest hits” – the most popular Book-a-Day blog posts since we started this almost three years ago. Today’s is A Dog’s Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin, reviewed by Bob M.

Every now and then I like to take a break from “serious” reading and check out a Juvenile fiction book. I especially enjoy listening to Juvenile Audio books. One that I listened to recently and enjoyed very much was A Dogs Life: the Autobiography of a Stray by Ann M. Martin, who is best known for the Babysitters Club books. I’m a huge dog lover and had to check with a Youth Librarian (Thanks Kathleen!) to make sure the dog did not die in the end, because Marley & Me just about did me in.

A Dog’s Life is about Squirrel who was born a stray along with her brother Bone in a shed by their mother, Stream at a family’s summer house. As Squirrel gets older she befriends the residents in the shed, a cat named Yellow Man as well as all the mice living in the barn. Mother teaches her puppies everything they need to know to survive and instills in them to be leery of humans. But one morning after mother vanishes Bone and Squirrel decide to leave. The shed was the only place Squirrel ever knew, but she would leave if Bone left, he was her brother and was now in charge.

Bone and Squirrel face many challenges on their new adventure, learning about the world very quickly and are soon found on the side of a highway where a couple stop and  take them home. They don’t live there very long. After one bad night, with garbage ransacking, barking and going to the bathroom in the house, the husband takes the two puppies to a parking lot and throws them out. Two women come along and take Bone, and now Squirrel is on her own.

Alone Squirrel faces new challenges, the cold of winter, starving dogs that will kill to eat, roads, and of course humans. One night Squirrel finds a dog, who she says resembles Bone. Her name is Moon. Squirrel is happy to have a companion. They live together for some time, until a speeding car takes Moons life. Squirrel gets a home but only for the summer, her owners adopt a “summer” dog every year but quickly tire of it, forgetting to feed or walk her. So Squirrel heads out on her own again. Squirrel lives on through the cold winters and hot summers, being careful to stay away from humans, till she is an old dog. An old dog with black fur beginning to turn white, a filmy eye, bad hearing in one ear, and very achy bones in the shoulder and leg that were broken when she was young.

Squirrel finally finds a home with an old woman who names her Addie. Together they form a relationship, each needing the other and Squirrel finally finds contentment with a human.

Prepare to shed some tears as you listen to Squirrel’s story. This heart-touching tale really brings to light the serious problem of homeless animals. By giving listeners a firsthand look through a stray’s eyes and heart, A Dog’s Life will inspire all of us to work together to eliminate this desperately tragic way of life that so many animals suffer. Ann M. Martin herself volunteers for an animal rescue, and she has successfully brought her true-life observations onto the pages of this amazing book. A must-read or listen for everyone.

For information about adopting a local stray check out these websites:

Wake County Animal Shelter

S.P.C.A of Wake County

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The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

Are you intrigued by the magical city of Venice? Did you love Peter Pan as a child? If so, then the juvenile novel, The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke, is a book you’re sure to enjoy this summer, either reading the book to yourself on the beach, or listening to the audio in the car with the entire family. The winner of several European Children’s Book Awards, it is a captivating read both for its story and its immersion into the mysterious and beautiful city of Venice which is, in its own way, another character in this story.

The book follows the story of two brothers, Bo and Prosper, who run away to Venice after their mother dies and they are put in the care of their cruel aunt and uncle who only want to keep Bo, the younger boy. In Venice they are befriended by a group of orphans who are supported by an enigmatic young man who calls himself the Thief Lord. The Thief Lord keeps them sheltered in an old movie theatre and fed by stealing goods from the wealthy homes in Venice and selling them to an unscrupulous shopkeeper. The Thief Lord is soon commissioned to steal an unusual article that leads the story into many twists and turns. Finally, it comes to a magical/fantastical climax on the Isola Segreta where a relic is enshrined that will change their lives forever. I first listened to the book driving back and forth to work and then reread it for a children’s book club selection, totally enjoying it both times. All the children and adults I know who have read it have also felt the same way about this exceptional book – an enjoyable escape.

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Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

Best-selling author Michael Crichton passed away a few years ago, although his newest novel was released at the end of 2011. It was finished posthumously by Richard Preston, best known for his nonfiction books, such as The Hot Zone. Fun fact: Richard Preston is the brother of thriller writer Douglas Preston, whose novels (co-written with Lincoln Child) are often compared to those of Michael Crichton.

For those familiar with Crichton’s novels, do yourself a favor and pick this up. You’ll be glad you did, because it reads like vintage Crichton: it’s fast, fun, and makes the future happen now. I’ll admit that I was a bit disillusioned by State of Fear, in which Crichton seemed to come down against the idea of global climate change, which is quite different than the views expressed of nature’s vanishing beauty in his memoir, Travels. But in Micro, as Richard Preston puts it, “he was writing at the top of his game.” Crichton is known for taking a small scientific or technological fact or discovery and building a whole pulse-pounding, page-turning story around it.

Graduate students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, each studying a different field of science, are being recruited by Vincent Drake, the charismatic founder of NaniGen MicroTechnologies. The students will be flown to Hawaii just for the chance to tour the facility and see some of the technology that will, as Drake says, “define the limits of discovery for the first half of the twenty-first century.” Peter Jansen, one of the students, happens to be the brother of Eric, one of NaniGen’s executives. Just before the students are to depart for Hawaii Peter receives a text from Eric that reads “Don’t come.” Peter and his friends make the journey anyway, and are stunned to learn that Eric is missing and presumed dead after an accident on his boat.  Peter believes that Drake is involved with his brother’s disappearance and when he tries to publicly confront him with some evidence, all seven students are also made to “disappear.” Sort of.

The heart of NaniGen’s breakthroughs is the ability to shrink objects and people to less than an inch in size. The students are then dumped in the rainforest jungle where they must fight to survive against all beetles, wasps and other insects, plus birds and the natural elements as their size works against them at every turn.

Sure, it may sound like Honey I Shrunk the Kids meets Jurassic Park, but for a Science Fiction lover the story and action kept me turning pages and wishing my lunch break were longer. I also couldn’t tell how much, or which parts, of the book were Crichton’s and which were Preston’s.

For a thrilling ride through the micro-verse, find and request this book in our catalog.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Pirates! Treasure! Adventure! All this and more await you as you accompany teenage Jim Hawkins on a journey from his family’s small inn to the famed and titular island. Stevenson’s tale is obviously well known, with many different movie adaptations,  and is generally thought to be a book for boys. Certainly boys (of all ages, even the big ones over 30) will enjoy the swashbuckling sailors and treachery of pirates, but those of the female persuasion are also quite likely to enjoy it. Of course, the romance of Pirates has not diminished in the hundred plus years since the novel’s publication (they are, after all, making another Pirates of the Carribbean movie to the delight of Johnny Depp fans). Beyond the subject matter, Stevenson’s unforgettable characters, especially that of the infamous Long John Silver, are what have made this classic endure.

The story is told from the recollections of the grown up Jim Hawkins, and begins with the arrival of an old sailor, Billy Bones, at his parent’s inn. It becomes clear that Billy is hiding from someone and asks Jim to keep an eye out for a man with a wooden leg. A blind man comes looking for Billy and he receives the dreaded “black spot” (marked for death). After Billy dies Jim and his mother check his sea chest so that Mrs. Hawkins may claim the payment she’s been denied. Jim also spies an oil cloth packet, which turns out to contain a very interesting map. Jim is soon on the run from the blind man and his nasty friends and finds safety with doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney. These three then organize a trip to follow the map and lay claim to the treasure. They hire a ship – the Hispaniola – and Captain Smollett, who has misgivings about their venture and the fact that the ship’s cook, Silver, has hand picked about half of the crew. Silver is all charm and compliments to everyone on board and is a ready, cheerful and willing part of the crew, at least to start with. As they get closer to the island mutiny becomes his clear intent and by the time they arrive at the island, the crew is divided in two camps with each side fighting the other for the map and treasure.

Much like Tarzan of the Apes this tale of adventure can be read as a light, easy story that doesn’t require much thought. However, if one wishes to examine the story and what books influenced Stevenson’s writing – and, in turn, what Stevenson then influenced – one may find more literary connections than initially suspected. Most editions of Treasure Island include an introduction which discusses this to some extent. In the Penguin version John Seelye explains that earlier works such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Washington’s Tales of a Traveler and Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans influenced Stevenson’s writing.  Stevenson, in turn, is said to have influenced J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Golding’s Lord of the Flies and almost every pirate story told since.  In fact, this novel is thought to be the first fictionalized appearance of such standard pirate cliches as the parrot on the shoulder, the peg leg, “X marks the spot,” and the now famous song lyric, “Fifteen men on a dead’s man’s chest – Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!”

Take a trip with Long John Silver on the Hispaniola by requesting this book in our catalog.