Adventurous reading into autumn

A Tugman’s Tale
Life Aboard Thames Steam Tugs in the 1960’s
by Anthony Edwards

In the late 50’s a 15-year-old boy applies for a job on a tugboat on the Thames. He’s immediately hired as a cook, and then proceeds to have an outrageously good time on board and on land, for the next 6 and 1/2 years. The 60’s comes along and social mores open up and he’s right in the midst of the fun. Life aboard a tugboat was hard and dangerous, but he was where he wanted to be.

This is a self-published book, and could have used more proofreading. But I’ve reviewed it because of the author’s extraordinary spirit – he was a rambunctious, wild, but hardworking youth, full of joie de vivre (so handsome that a few times he was mobbed by gangs of giggling girls and subjected to scary goings-on, if you believe him, which I do!). He later moved to the south of France and created an organic farm and became a kinesiologist, hypnotist, and psychotherapist. And has a wife and a cat.

I liked it because it is such a happy book, although he does not stint in describing sad things when he meets them.

Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell

I listened to this on an MP3 until the MP3 began to gap and repeat and hitch and stutter. Then I ordered the book and finished reading it. Superb! I loved the audio – all the voices – but the book is great, very readable even though so antique. It’s about relationships in two families in early 19th century northwest England, in a small village. Subtly-drawn characters, and sometimes funny. Rich and calm and pastoral. About two young girls coming of age in the household of a country doctor.

The Wager
A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
by David Grann

Well, gosh. If you think the world is all going to hooey and things are getting worse and worse, how would you like to be suddenly back in 1740, press-ganged and forced to sail away on a huge ship that took 4,000 ancient oaks to make, from 100 acres of felled trees? A ship which worms have made infirm in the extreme before it’s even fully built?

Then, nobody knows about bacteria and viruses, so when you sleep in a hammock shoved right up against the other sailors, the lice crawling from one to another bite you and leave traces of poo in the bites that are crawling with typhus. So very soon half the sailors die and the rest have to work twice as hard to sail the ship (which is on a mission to pirate a treasure galleon belonging to Spain).

Then the scurvy sets in, nobody knows the cause, and the suffering is terrible, your limbs swell, skin turns black, teeth fall out, hair too, incredible pain as the lack of vit C prevents collagen production. A broken leg you’d had 15 years before re-breaks as if it had never healed. Many sailors and officers and maybe the captain too, all die. Then, you are set to sail round Cape Horn, unbeknownst to anyone it’s during the worst part of the year, and storms tear the ship apart. Nobody knows how to determine longitude, so you don’t know where you are. But oho, an island!! And now your troubles really begin…

Too, the racism everyone suffers from makes you sneer at the indigenous people who save your life. They flee when they realise that violence is about to break out among the survivors…

I bought this book because I’d really enjoyed a story in the New Yorker from another of this author’s books about a lost city in the Amazon. I was not disappointed – I found this report riveting and educational and… well, I was just so glad to be in a nice warm clean quiet bed in 2024.

Coasting
Running Around the Coast of Britain – Life, Love and (Very) Loose Plans
by Elise Downing

A young woman not long out of University, feeling lost and perplexed, decides to run around the entire coast of Britain, unsupported, with just a small backpack. She’s plugged into an adventure org called Yes, which meets for camping and festivals. And her dad comes to run with her once a month. In fact, lots of people run with her for a day or two here and there. She gets extremely muddy, eats a lot of cake, and processes a toxic love affair that she has suffered a lot from. This is all in 2016.

It’s a fun book, competent and often amusing, and we appreciate her humbleness – she sets out on this adventure with such a complete lack of preparation that we can only laugh. Many, many people are kind to her en route, and we enjoy the tale, and the very human juxtaposition of extreme flakiness and great stubbornness she demonstrates.

Mountain Disasters
True Accounts of Rescue from the Brink of Death
by Joe Simpson et. al.

An excellent collection of distinguished mountain rescue writing by many rescuers in many lands. My favourite was a Czech story where rescuers had tried and failed to bring a couple down from a high bivouac in a storm. Exhausted, they went out for one more try, traipsing across a frozen lake towards the mountain. Suddenly they happened to look up and see the cloud raising and the mountain exposed; in that moment a black dot detached from the white precipice, and sailed and bounced high, down, down, down… and landed at the edge of the lake. They ran and there was the woman, who said, “It’s so nice you all came to meet me!” and passed out. (Her partner was dead. As with all mountaineering books, fatalities abound.) She had a broken leg but was otherwise okay.

If you’re more in the mood to read about hairy mountain exploits than to do them or fall down from them, this is a far-ranging and involving volume.

Them
Adventures with Extremists
by Jon Ronson

From 2001, but still relevant. This funny, humble, intrepid investigator embeds himself with conspiracy theorists, including David Icke (so if you’ve ever wondered if the world is ruled by shape-shifting 12-foot lizards, this is the book for you) and survivalists and elite CEOs and wealthy-boss-wallahs, to find out if the stories are true. It’s quite a romp. The general sense I’m left with is that humans are well-meaning idiots, unless they are ill-meaning idiots; and often both. I laughed quite a lot.

The author also wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats, and The Psychopath Test, and other intriguing books. He’s a columnist for the Guardian. [Also see Madhuri’s short review of Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness by the same author.]

A Piece of Cake
by Cupcake Brown

A memoir so dense and gnarly and redemptive and surprising, I was moved and stomach-roiled and amazed by turns. In 541 pages we are immersed in a world of gangs and slang and abuse and drugs, drugs, drugs; and help and determination and a spirit clawing its way back to the surface from the depths of hell. And a cast of staunch and good people, and ruined people, and ruining people; and faith found and rising.

A happy child living with her mother in a big house in San Diego’s ghetto; running around singing “Chain of Fools” – and next morning her mother is dead and a flawed System sends the child away from loved and loving family into the foster system, where she is immediately used as prey in vile and heartless ways.

We follow her onto the streets – still age 11 – and onwards… But in the end she becomes a lawyer in a high-powered San Francisco firm, and a motivational speaker. How she got there is well worth reading about.

The writing is steady and competent and unsparing, full of the aliveness and passion of a woman who could not, ultimately, be stopped.

I grew up not too far from the places she describes, but in another decade. Gangs were unknown then, but came along after I left. It was fascinating to read of the tribal values and customs forged by these teens to give themselves a sense of belonging and love; and to, atavistically, keep out the perceived rivals.

I was left with a new respect for the university system (and many people in it) that nurtured this estimable woman too.

Once is Enough
by Miles Smeeton

Three experienced sailors – a married couple and a friend – in 1959 take a graceful, snug, and seaworthy yacht into the Southern Ocean from Melbourne to Chile. They are gambling on not meeting a 50-ft wave at just the wrong angle… in the middle of what is guaranteed to be a wild ride.

But they meet that wave, and somersault, and the masts are gone… the belly of the boat a chaos of water and spilled and broken things. The hatch ripped off and more water pouring in.

The story of how they all pitch in to repair the ship and sail into a bay in Chile is unusually upbeat for sailing disaster memoirs – in fact, these people seem to be lucky and favoured all round, and the odd cataclysmic upset (there are two) scarcely dents their well-being, after the first shock. The characters are likeable, the writing absolutely great – smooth, lively, lyrical, accomplished. There is a tremendous amount of sailing terminology laid out with meticulous ease – rather like a pointillist painting where the artist points at this that or the other organ or trimming or bit of ship, each some word I do not know, but the whole makes a picture anyway.

And then there is a cat – a Siamese named Pwe – adding irresistibleness.
I simply enjoyed the writing so much I would have followed this guy up a mountain (and it seems he is a mountaineer as well, and owns a farm in BC).

I kept wondering if any of this was usual for the 50’s – especially the incredibly intrepid, adventurous, and capable Beryl, wife of the author. Anyway, it’s a very good book.

The Moth and the Mountain
A True Story of Love, War and Everest
by Ed Caesar

A true tale of romance and folly. An endearing character called Maurice Wilson, a decorated veteran of the WWI trenches, born and raised in Bradford (just up the road from where I live in W Yorkshire), decides to fly a Gipsy Moth to the lower slopes of Everest and then climb to the peak and down again. This is the 30s, and Britain is determined to be the first to conquer Everest, but the mountain is as yet unclimbed (unless Mallory actually summited before he died on the mountain).

Maurice has never climbed anything and doesn’t know how to fly. But, nothing daunted, he learns to fly, gets the plane, and proceeds to ignore an entire international machine set in train to stop him. He is also in love with a married woman in London, and writes her wonderful, lively, optimistic letters.

The book, written clearly and well, takes us from Bradford to WWI to the flight from country to country to India, to his disguising himself as a Tibetan priest to evade detection, to his plane being impounded, and on to Everest on foot… I was most touched by the scenes at the Rongbuk monastery near Everest, and the scenes on the mountain. Reinhold Messner, the great mountaineer, had an enormous respect for Maurice Wilson, whom he saw as an adventurer of the purest sort.

In his book The Crystal Horizon he also said, “I am a fool, who with his longing for love and tenderness runs up cold mountains.”

I found the book heart-touching and a bit heart-rending, and there is a tenderness in it too. Adventure, love, blitheness, determined individuality/eccentricity, politics, bitter cold, high altitude… and some possible gender-bending – add up to an intriguing read.

Dead Mountain
The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
by Donnie Eichar

An excellent book on a fascinating old mystery.

In 1959, Soviet universities were undergoing an exciting opening and re-vivifying, and much optimism was in the air. Hiking clubs were the norm, and students of the sciences or whatever also strove for hard-won certificates in outdoorsmanship. They took expeditions into deep wilderness, even in winter, and employed what they’d learnt about every detail of the camping experience: how and where to set up tents, survival in emergencies, etc. And, of course, they went in groups – in this case 10 students. And they had tremendous fun, taking along musical instruments and doing a great deal of singing. Women and men went together, but in those days they were virginal.

This expedition was an effort to climb Ortoten Mountain, in the Urals, in February. One hiker had lifelong rheumatism and pain forced him to turn back at the last outpost of civilisation. He is the only one who survived. The others were found after much searching, far from the tent and without shoes on, scattered here and there, hundreds of yards from each other, dead.

Nobody could figure out what had happened to them, and it has been a huge mystery, much-written-about, ever since. Theories abound.

An American journalist became fascinated with the subject and went to Russia 50 years after the tragedy to see if he could solve the conundrum. He intended to follow the route of the hikers and see what he could see; also in February.

It’s written clearly and simply, well-researched, and he was able to spend time with that one survivor. I learned some fascinating things about meteorology, and about Soviet youth culture of that time. A good sturdy and touching and fairly electrifying read. And yes, he might have solved the question, and it’s worth knowing what he did find, for all of us – since it behooves us to understand even eccentric weather phenomena, I think!

The Party
One Night. A lifetime of secrets.
by Elizabeth Day

This is an excellent novel. I’d not read anything by this author, but she’s good and I’ll look for more.

A cold, repressed, social-climber closet gay guy (we only figure out this orientation slowly) with a warm, martyred wife are entangled with a pair of wealthy aristocrats, the husband being an old school friend of the chilly young gay guy; who is really madly in love with that aristo, since forever. In fact, he did something for him once, long before, in their wild days at Cambridge…

Everything plays out calmly and in a measured way; the viewpoint alternating between wife and husband. Police are involved but it’s not a classic detective story, more a psychological drama. The ending was plausible and the educated, even tone persists throughout. If you want a pleasantly intelligent, fairly gripping read that doesn’t horrify you with too much blood and guts (though there is some) this is a good bet. I especially commend it for not going overboard, yet staying interesting.

Featured image by anotherxlife on Unsplash

All reviews previously posted on Facebook