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THE COLOMBO BAY

Name: THE COLOMBO BAY
Author: Richard Pollak
ISBN: 0-7432-0073-X

by Richard Pollak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2004

An unfair comparison, perhaps, for Pollak writes with an eminently serious purpose. He tells a story worth hearing,...

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Let us go down to the sea—in containers.

Along about 1937, writes Nation contributing editor Pollak (The Creation of Dr. B, 1997), a North Carolina freight entrepreneur named Malcolm McLean conceived the happy idea that a truck hauled up onto a ship could be transported around the world and drive off with its cargo into distant lands. By the 1950s, McLean Trucking dispensed with the trucks themselves, instead loading ships with stackable containers: and thus were born container ships. Packing volumes of Melville and Conrad as his shipboard reading, Pollak embarks on one such ship, the Colombo Bay, for a world-striding cruise from Hong Kong to New York via Suez. “There is not much romance left in the technologized, just-in-time world of twenty-first-century merchant shipping,” he observes, though there’s plenty of danger from killer waves and undercooked food. More usual, on this massive ship (“she is some 105 feet wide and more than 900 feet long. . . . She weights 60,000 deadweight tons”), are long days of checking GPS coordinates, monitoring ocean traffic, feeding stowaway crows, and keeping an eye out for pirates—a very real threat in the South China Sea. Pollak does a good job of explaining why so many ships fly flags of convenience, why so many merchant sailors these days are from the Philippines, and why container shipping remains an important vehicle for the world economy, especially for goods of Asian provenance. Still, the narrative is a little, beg pardon, dry; the British comic and traveler Michael Palin covered much the same ground, with plenty of circumstantial detail and much more entertainingly, in a single chapter of Around the World in Eighty Days (1991).

An unfair comparison, perhaps, for Pollak writes with an eminently serious purpose. He tells a story worth hearing, especially for readers interested in the grittier details of globalization and in true tales of the high seas.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2004

ISBN: 0-7432-0073-X

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.