Years ago as a child I rad something about Ellesmere Island in a magazine and thought about what a forbidding but fascinating place it must be. Reading this book made it clear that my long-ago opinion of Ellesmere was not mere childhood fantasy but the plain truth. Jerry Kobalenko makes one of the most remote places in the world much more accessible to one's imagination, even if physically getting there remains a costly challenge. Ellesmere truly is a remarkable place, and the author manages to convey his sense of awe in a way that readers far away in more hospitable climes can grasp. He also has an ability to weave travelogue and history together almost seamlessly, in a way that very few authors can. Speaking of history, the account of the ill-fated Green expedition of the 1880's is by itself almost worth the price of the book. Just the thought of being reduced to eating bird droppings and candle wax for survival is almost beyond comprehension.
My only minor criticism is that the map of Ellesmere is not as detailed as it could have been. But let me emphasize, it's a minor point. I recommend this book very highly.

It is fun to read about what makes Jerry Kobalenko happy. It will be even more fun for the huge majority of readers to realize how little fun they would have doing the same things. The minority who fantasize about being chased by a polar bear, sledding in midnight daylight, or camping at 58 degrees below zero Fahrenheit will find lots of useful information in Kobalenko's book, _The Horizontal Everest: Extreme Journeys on Ellesmere Island_ (Soho Press). The rest of us may shake our heads in wonder, and be glad that reading the book is as close as we need get to one of the harshest environments on Earth. "Where is Ellesmere Island? Think of the little metal disk that sits on top of a globe: Ellesmere is under that." It is a Canadian island, just 450 miles from the North Pole.

He doesn't live there all the time (he lives in Canada), because he does have to make a living, which he does mostly by taking photographs and writing about his travels on his island and other inhospitable spots. For the past fifteen years, he has roamed the island in various expeditions, often solo. He has traveled, by foot, thousands of miles across and around the island, more than anyone alive. He doesn't use dogs. He has no radio. He hikes, pulling a sled full of the stuff he predicts he will need. He writes about preparing beforehand 54 peanut butter and jam sandwiches (one per day) because "long ago, I had discovered that making a sandwich on the arctic trail meant hacking for fifteen minutes at toffee-hard peanut butter with a Swiss Army knife and laying the shrapnel between crumbly pieces of frozen bread." Coated with butter, each thousand-calorie sandwich was like "vegetarian seal blubber," full of energy required for a freezing pack animal.

Much of this book tells the story of other travelers in the area. Kobalenko recreates some of the expeditions from the past, visiting the campsites from the last two centuries which the arctic cold has preserved. He is delighted whenever he finds cairns, the traditional rock piles set up as commemorative markers. Sometimes there is a note in a bottle, and he is the first to poke around and bring it back home. He might turn up rusted cans, matches, buttons, and shell casings, as he did at Starvation Camp, where most of the members of Adolphus Greely's expedition died in 1884. He feels guilty making his simple meals there. He sees for himself Crocker Land which was sighted by Perry in 1906. Perry knew that explorers make names for themselves by finding new territories, and also that they finance their expeditions by flattering those who back them. Perry named Crocker Land after a backer of his expedition. A later one sent to find it demonstrated that Perry had only seen a mirage. Combining history, natural science, and adventure, Kobalenko's surprising observations, written in smooth, calm, sensible prose, are entertaining throughout.

The first point to make about Jerry Kobalenko, author of The Horizontal Everest is that he is exactly whom he represents himself to be: a resourceful, self-reliant, self-sufficient arctic trekker. My introduction to Kobalenko was while standing in the lee of Skraeling Island watching a lone skier, man-hauling a sled on the southern side of Alexandra Fiord. I had just finished a dogsled navigation of Svedrup Pass in a conflict ridden and dissension riddled group, much as had been experienced by the author on at least one occasion, and some of the treks he describes of others.

This is a well-written book, which describes on a very human level the personal and physical effort of the arctic experience. He easily brings to life personalities and events much better than the score of history books I have read of the arctic.

Three kinds of readers would enjoy this book. Firstly, the reader who occasionally randomly chooses a book in hopes of being entertained educated or enlightened. Another person who would derive pleasure is someone who has an academic interest in the arctic, or, who enjoys books of personal effort, and enjoys histories and descriptions of arcane places and events. Finally, anyone with actual arctic experience who wants to relive places and experiences would find this book captivating.

One warning: begin this book when you have a free weekend, because once you start it, you can kiss your weekend goodbye, as you will be unable to put it aside.

On a personal note, though Kobalenko gives little credibility to the Cook claim, it was a passing comment by him that got me interested in the Peary/Cook controversy such that I am now on the board of the Dr. Frederick A. Cook Society. Also, however well written, listening to Jerry describe his Gun Fight at Polar Bear Corral is much more entertaining while sitting on insulated sleeping mats, drinking hot Tang while warming one's hands on the walls of the insulated mug, near the ice foot of an island, in a frozen sea of ice.

This is the coolest book I ever took a trip on! The magic mushrooms, and the little berries on the island of legend, took me took me to new heights! I've never read anything funnier in my life, than the paranoia from the magic berries. Way too cool! Can't wait for more, this is a million laughs! Right ON!!
Rusty

I'm a High Schooler in Dublin Ohio, and a book reader at heart. I must say, "Island Of Life" is one of the very best comedy/fantasy books I have ever had the pleasure to read. It is what I would personally call, "The most relatable book to lives adolescent years that has come along in all of my reading and learning years. So many of the hillarious stories within the book are so familiar, I felt I was the main character. I would strongly recommend this marvelous comedy to all middle-schoolers, high-Schoolers, and college students-you will laugh till you hurt!~ Let's don't forget the hidden fantasy within either, which is of itself, a story, within a story, within a story; a colorfully written storyline about a kaleidoscope world of magical legend, and wild berries growing on the vines, just waiting to be picked and take the reader to new, and higher heights of euphoria. Congratulations by me, and friends, on this being one of the funniest, and most entertaining books for high school students that we've ever read. Big Thumbs Up!! Benjamin Campbell-Hilliard Davidson High

This story had me falling off my chair! Too much. This story is one of the very best comedies I've ever read. The fantasy, well, all I can say is, breathtaking and bold! Way to go Stephen, can't wait for the second book.

How did our parents get hold of this book in Christchurch New Zealand! We grew up reading this book and never thought any thing was weird about it, but man it's twisted! And it was cool how it was kind of based on New Zealand too... Is it supposed to be a kid's book? It's pretty adult! We have lost our copy (never loan anything to your children or their friends) and would love to know how much it would cost to replace it. Can anyone help us!

Fi and Nell

A friend recently passed this book around at an adult party, much to everyone's amazement. The pictures must have been drawn by someone on acid. Everyone's favorite picture was the group of "circus freaks," including a pantsless man with three penises. One page showed a cave with a penis as one of the stalactites. A cloud was in the shape of a nude woman, including nipples. A sequence of tiny pictures in a banner showed a person's life from his graphic birth to his death, including his sexual union that produced his own child. This is one weird children's book.

The only time I have ever seen this book was in the early 80's in Santa Clara, California. A person I met owned it and let me read it. I've been looking for it ever since. I thought I would try Amazon on a whim. Was I surprised to find it was even mentioned. I will buy it first opportunity I get.

Island of Refuge is a subtly drawn together story of a rag-tag group of down-and-outers coming together in an abandoned church on Lamb's Island, a rocky, wind-blown patch off the coast of Maine. Lamb's Island is very much off the beaten path with only one way on and off the island. You have to really want to be there to get there. The living is plain and hard, close to the land and the ocean.

The aimlessly wandering, searching souls arrive one at a time and find shelter and peace until the death of a young mother shakes the island refuge and reawakens the pain of the loss of another young woman twenty years earlier. With the stoicism inherent in the islanders, life continues as normal, but with suspicion towards the group of church-dwellers who have wounds enough that need to heal.

With delicate intricacy, Hall has interwoven the lives of the characters from the island, the mainland and Canada. Very well done. I had a hard time laying aside this well-plotted mystery, so full of expression.

This was one of the best books I have read in quite some time. I enjoy christian fiction, but get tired of some of the sugary- sweet dialog and how everything is just a little too perfect in the end. Linda's books are really true-to-life and they have a good message too. I have read Margret's Peace and Katheryn's Secret (both excellent books), but Island of Refuge is my favorite. It keeps you guessing right up until the end.

Lamb's Island, Maine is a small community of close-knit people who watch out for one another. In the abandoned church on the island lives an unusual mix of people who are escaping from society for one reason or another. When one of them turns up murdered, they all fall suspect. Is it Jeremiah, running from his old life as a minister, or Peter, escaping a murder charge? Colin seems to have a dark secret in his past as well, and Philip does not appear honest to anyone, except the wife and daughter that he has abandoned in the old church. As Hall weaves this tale of suspense, you will be enthralled with the twists and turns that it takes. Every time I thought that I had it figured out, something new would crop up, like a nosy ferryman, an upscale dress designer, or a strange rowboat parked on the sand. Hall has once again shown that she is a master of the suspense novel. You will not be able to put it down.

Highly innovative and unusual prose. The author has such a genuinely unique and vivid style that the book begs to be absorbed in a single sitting. Very fresh, authentic, and almost photographically realistic. I understand Broekhuizen has additional works pending - I can't wait. This is great stuff!

Islands is well written, holds your interest throughout. Eager for other works by Mr.Broekhuizen.

Provocative and disturbing, it was difficult to put this novel down once I began reading. It appears to have been very well-researched and believable.

Fine stories of men's world
By ERIC MILES WILLIAMSON

ISLANDS, WOMEN, AND GOD.
By Paul Ruffin.
Browder Springs, $24.95 hardcover,
$16.95 paperback.

PAUL Ruffin, poet, short-story writer and professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, writes about Texas and the Gulf Coast so well that his new story collection is likely to define the literary territory for many years to come.

The 17 stories in the collection are about common people, folks from Texas and Mississippi who live quiet and humble lives -- factory workers, farmers, fishermen, husbands and wives and youngsters and oldsters. Although the characters are common people, the book is not. These stories are masterful, every line honed and tight and true, the sentences spoken by the characters in phrases we've often before heard but never before seen on the page.

Ruffin's work has been compared with that of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, but his stories are not derivative. Rather, they're part of the new wave of Southern fiction generally and Texas fiction specifically, a wave that includes Southerners such as Barry Hannah, Padgett Powell, Chris Offutt and Charlie Smith, and Texas writers such as Glenn Blake and Tracy Daugherty. Not insignificantly, Ruffin occasionally pays tribute to Cormac McCarthy, a Southerner-turned-Texan like Ruffin himself.

Islands, Women, and God is a man's book about the world of men. The stories center on the conflicts inherent in the stifled, brutal and often senseless world of masculinity.

Manhunt, the opening story, is about the apprehension of an escaped convict. The hunters of the convict are local men who normally spend their days selling cars and working for insurance companies, these otherwise calm men turned into bloodthirsty bigots and would-be killers, the manhunt a legal excuse to do what they would be doing were there not the constructs of "civil" society. Underpinning our culture is a violence that needs very little to turn supposedly peaceful family men into primordial beasts, Ruffin seems to say.

In Tattered Coat Upon a Stick, Ruffin writes of an aging man who, rather than live out his days in senility and helplessness, emasculated, chooses to return to the family property in the country and end his life properly and with dignity. His end is far from morbid or maudlin, but instead glorious and beautiful.

Interloper relates the tale of a family man who discovers a burglar in his house and takes care of him. Just before the protagonist of the story meets the burglar, Ruffin writes,

No, it is nothing that would warrant calling the police or awakening your wife, nothing to justify wrenching off a table leg and swinging it wildly through the dark. But it is more than simply nothing. So you must summon whatever resolve you are capable of and go down the stairs into the cold darkness of what a few hours earlier was your warm and well-lit den. You are in charge -- it is your house, your domain, and while your wife and children sleep you must stand watch if there is a threat. This is the law. A very old one.

When Ruffin's men pop, when their natures surface, he is there with some of the most perceptive and powerful observations in American literature, or any literature for that matter.

One of the best stories in the collection, The Sign, shows the brutality of father to son and son to father. At the beginning of the story we find a description of the father beating his son:

"I will beat your skin off, boy. You hold still." And the belt came down time and time again on his back, lapping around his protruding ribs like a devil's tongue, then curling about his legs, snapping until all the feeling went away and there was only sound, only sound -- and he could feel the warm of his blood trailing down from the welts, seeking its way, gathering and dripping. He stood like something carved of wax, not feeling the belt but feeling the blood. He would not cry. He clenched his eyes and teeth, but he would not cry.

The story centers on the father's wedding anniversary and a family reunion. The son returns home for only the second time in 40 years for the event. The father is dying of cancer, and the son exacts his revenge in spectacular and appropriate fashion, not by killing the father but by doing something far worse and more enduring.

The title and final story of the collection, Islands, Women, and God, is about a man named Ray who fakes his own death and deserts his wife and children to live on the barrier islands of the Gulf Coast. He is discovered by a former co-worker and friend, and the story gives occasion for Ruffin to present a sad and unfortunately viable solution to the condition of men: solitude and atavism, regression into an animal state in nature. Ray says, "I'm in harmony, man, with this island, with this Gulf. I got everything I need out here to live, and everything's in balance." Later he explains that every man is called to this state of being:

"It comes for every man. ... Every man. Only most don't know what they're seeing or feeling, or they don't know what to do about it. I'm telling you, Roger, an old man over there [in society] is, as Yeats says, just a scarecrow. Out here he's more. He's everything. He's a skull full of lightning. He's -- he's God, or he's soon going to be, because God is all of this."

We leave the book with Ray on his island and Roger back in civilization, longing to be living on an island of his own, afraid to do so yet wanting to do so.

Islands, Women, and God is an astonishing book. Every page is beautifully written, splendidly rendered and bold. Where weaker writers grow timid and shrivel, Ruffin burrows deep into truths we know but don't admit to knowing. In a time when American writers seem to strive to either shock or soothe, Ruffin instead gives us an honest vision of what lies beneath the veneer of manners and society. He is a master of language and a peerless teller of tales, and he will surely be known as one of the best writers of his generation.

Eric Miles Williamson is the author of the novel East Bay Grease and a graduate of the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. He lives in Missouri and is at work on his second novel.

Islands, Women, and God. By Paul Ruffin. In Islands, Women, and God, Paul Ruffin returns to the Alabama, Mississippi and Texas regions he rendered so memorable in his 1993 critically acclaimed short story collection The Man Who Would Be God. They are tales of passion, suspense, violence, racial injustice, renewal, and the inexorable human quest for meaning and identity, laced with flashes of humor. Ruffin's ear for dialogue is impeccable, and his narratives are ripped, pulsing and breathing, from the unmistakable fabric of reality. The author wastes no time engaging the reader's attention. On page one of "Manhunt," the first story of section I, in searing prose pungent as the smell of burning flesh, Ruffin drops his reader deep into the pit of human violence. "The Pond" features Gerald Roper, an aging man who trespasses across Mr. Earl Palmer's pasture to fish in an artesian-fed fishpond. During his fishing expedition, Roper snags a great white thing rolling "like a dumpling in oil as the hook pulled loose and the bobber whistled past his head and clattered onto the gravel behind him, and two eyeless sockets in a white face, cradled by trembling reeds, looked right past him toward the ghostly moon." Next the reader finds Roper questioned by a deputy to whom he has gone to confess his shocking finding. Though the deputy, after viewing the "catch" and recognizing what it is, tries to convince Roper he's hooked a pig, Roper adamantly insists that what he snagged was the bloated body of his former mistress. Among the male protagonists of the other stories in section I are Mr. Turner of "Tattered Coat Upon a Stick," who, terminally ill, returns to his beloved Texas hill country to face his own death; Johnny of "The Sign," who, brutally physically abused during his childhood by his father, returns to his home after a lengthy absence and exacts his sweet revenge; the two graduate students of "Corn-Silver" who are hilariously duped by an illiterate, white-trash kid; and Buddy of "The Dog," a tragic figure who, in saving a dog caught up in a trotline, has his nose bitten off by the very beast whose life he saves, only to end up so monstrous in appearance he's abandoned even by his wife and kids, assuming a huge and dark presence "like some kind of old imagined or remembered sin." "The Dog," tragic though it is, is balanced with a moment of hilarity characteristic of Ruffin's brilliant humor. In section II, "woman" takes center stage: woman as "Nature," the mirror of mortality, the instrument of renewal, and seducer. Ruffin bares the hearts and minds of his female characters with a dispassionate clarity reminiscent of the late Eudora Welty. In "Peaches," one of the most sensual stories in the collection, a white woman misinterprets the remark of a black man who tells her that she has "nice peaches." She and her husband, Murle, are peach orchard keepers, and sell peaches in cardboard boxes by the road. Having packed his pistol and journeyed deep into the woods to the black man's cabin to address the presumed insult, he finds him on his porch steps fondling the exposed breasts of his lover. She sees Murle and rushes inside their shack, standing just inside the doorway. Upon repeated questioning by Murle as to what he meant when he said Sally had "nice peaches," Cliff insistently assures him he was only referring to the actual peaches they were selling. Meanwhile, Cliff's lover, realizing his trouble with the white man, seduces him and relieves Murle of his frustration. During the intimacy which ensues, Murle overhears an animal shrieking in the barn. She assures him that it's "just that mule," and that Cliff will stay in the barn until they're finished. Later, after Murle receives the sexual fulfillment he's so long desired, he changes his demeanor toward Cliff completely, feeling like they're friends or brothers. The "gods" revealed in the collection are as multifarious as the men and women who turn to them in their hours of darkness. There's the Great Spirit of the Kiowa in "Tattered Coat Upon a Stick;" the wrathful God of "The Sign;" the jealous God of "Peaches;" the comforting God Buddy turned to in his huge and dark loneliness; and the God of Nature of "The Drought," "April Treason" and "Islands, Women, and God." In many ways, "Islands, Women, and God," the final and title story of the collection, is a brilliant summation of the men and women who dominate the stories preceding it. Ray, the story's protagonist, fakes his death at sea to live out the rest of his life alone on a barrier island off the coast of Mississippi. Philosophizing with his friend, Roger, who "finds" him but swears to keep the find a secret between the two of them so Ray's wife can collect his life insurance, Ray says: "About women. I'm gon' tell you something else about women, some more gospel, long's I got your attention. Women are a hell of a lot closer to the center of things than men are or ever were. They're closer to the Godhead. Women are Nature. Like this island. Man, they got dark currents in them, deeper than ours run, and their bodies and minds are a great mystery, which is why men will never understand'm. They're in synch with the motion of the universe. Men are just dreams, or worse, just half dreams, but women are real. Men look for the reasons, but women are the Reason." With his second collection of stories, Ruffin makes another significant contribution to Southern and American letters. In spare, muscular prose seamless as a tendril of kudzu, Ruffin probes, with haunting insight, the light, darkness and yearning of the human heart. --Larry D. Thomas, author of Amazing Grace

Islands, Women, and God, Stories by Paul Ruffin. Browder Springs Press, 2001. 237 pp. These seventeen stories play themselves out in the Deep South, East Texas, and West Texas, three areas as dissimilar--in geography, social mores, and philosophy--as, say, Iceland, Bolivia, and Ethiopia. And while Paul Ruffin does employ his considerable skill to give vivid descriptions of these places, his poet's eye and voice and heart focuses tighter and truer on his characters, who, as credible characters must be, are spit-polished mirrors of people everywhere. And what a parade of individuals he sends forth. There's Sam, who undertakes, with a tunnel vision worthy of Ahab, to capture an enormous manta ray in "Devilfish". And Mitchell, in "Tattered Coat Upon a Stick", who wants nothing more than to have his ashes scattered among the mesquite bushes and rocks of the place where he grew up, rather than end up planted in the upscale, manicured cemetery that his children insist upon. And Loretta, perhaps the most haunting of the bunch, who uses the only tool at her disposal to save her husband in "Peaches." Loretta, who is black, has to make her unique sacrifice in the unrelenting era of racial inequality. A young insurance salesman, in "Manhunt", must make his among kudzu-draped backwoods. In "The Interloper", a husband and father must seek out something in the dark rather than lose his family to it, and characters in two of the tales choose to face their final darkness on their own terms. Sacrifice and reconciliation abound. Several of the stories chip away at the old, hard strata of established society in their various settings, and prejudice and cruelty and pomposity are served up in equal measure with love and trust and devotion. In "Corn Silver", a haughty graduate student is duped by an ignorant boy; in "The Sign," a middle aged man whose greatest accomplishment was to move permanently away from his harsh, Mississippi delta upbringing must go back to finally confront it. They were his people only in biological fact. From the eldest to the ones in diapers, they were an illiterate lot, mostly day laborers, fundamentalist in their worship and ultra-conservative in whatever politics they followed. If evolution had had a hand in improving the line over the decades, he could not imagine what they must have been like a century before - he doubted that the generations had witnessed much more than a gradual separation of forehead from cheekbones and thinning of hair from the backs and shoulders of the males. And on and on, in trailer parks, at fishing holes, on wide front porches of bourbon swilling lawyers, the themes of facing death, and, perhaps more importantly, facing life, weave their way through. And it is refreshing to read a writer who chooses not to veil his work in deep symbolism and puzzling time shifts. Every offering in Islands, Women, and God is told carefully and beautifully and forthrightly. Like the works of O'Conner and Welty, they don't have be worked at, but simply enjoyed. Whether the situations are humorous--especially when the author's letter perfect use of regional dialect runs rampant--or intense, or sad, the characters ring always true, and might just be the lady you find yourself standing behind in a grocery line. The man leaning over his bacon and eggs down the counter. The little boy not paying attention two pews up. There's a comfort level that comes with recognizing folks--be they lovable or detestable or anywhere in between--and it is as beneficial when reading good fiction as it is when stepping into a crowded room. Some reviewers have said that Ruffin is at his best when writing about fishing, a pursuit that he loves, and is good at. He's managed to work it into his poems and stories countless times and, I agree, it makes for fine reading. But I hold that he shines brightest when dealing with average people facing the daily dilemmas that life and fate just plop down in their paths. In "Drought", a couple of city dwellers have sunk all of their savings into a farm, only to be dealt a stunning setback by nature. In bed that night they listen as frogs and crickets drum and chirp around the ponds and down along the creek. The air is fresh smelling, almost cool. They lie across the bed with their heads at the open window. "I suppose," he says, "that we'll get over this." "Oh, yes, we always do." "Still, wouldn't it be good just once to get something without having to give something up?" "Somehow," she says, "it usually seems to work that way." And it usually does. In stories and in everyday life. Facing each day as it comes. Giving things up. Getting over something. And Ruffin chronicles the delicate dance nicely. In "The Pond", an old man has fallen hopelessly, headlong in love. There were times when but for the fact that he had not a dram of creative blood in him he would have gotten up and written her a poem, so deep was his passion for her. Such is the depth of Paul Ruffin's passion for the ongoing drama of living. And the reader benefits greatly from the fact that his creativity far surpasses a dram. --Ron Rozelle, author of Into That Good Night, The Windows of Heaven, and A Place Apart

I love Lassen's work, and this book shows why. He is a master at beautiful scenic paintings. The colors are brilliant and keeps me wondering on how he gets his paintings to look like that. Although I think Wyland is the master when it comes to painting whales, Lassen is the master at painting dolphins. A must have to any art collector who loves oceanic art.

"LASSEN ISLAND" IS A MUST OWN! It includes "sixty-five of Lassen's most evocative works...[and Lassen] captures the romantic allure of the Hawaiian Islands where he makes his home and pays tribute to the sea's great and endangered mammals."[commentator] His work spans from 1983-1997. My (newest) favorites are: "GALAXY OF LIFE", "COSMIC VOYAGERS", "WHALE STAR", "OUR PLANET", "SERENITY", "SEA OF TRANQUILITY", "PARADISE", "ANCIENT MYSTERIES" and "TEMPLE OF LIGHT". (Just to name a few!)

Also included is a fascinating essay writen by Christian himself about "THE SEA AS THE SOURCE OF MY ART", "NATURE ENERGIZES ME AND MY ART", "THE HIGHLY DEVELOPED MAMMALS OF THE OCEAN", and "OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO THE FUTURE." Christian writes with such sensitivity and style that even if you already have all of his art (books) this essay alone gives you a reason to buy this.

"LASSEN ISLAND" is the culmination to date of Christian's expertise. I never thought he could get any better but I was wrong! He has taken his art to the outermost level that I can imagine. "The images I paint are no longer simply representations of the forms of animals but the representations of their spirit" Lassen states in his essay.

"Ranked the number nine surfer in the world, Lassen is intimately acquainted with the mother ocean's ever-changing moods and awesome power." [commentator] Christian is one-in-a-million; not to be compared with anyone else. That is what a true artist is; in a class by himself.

88 pages may seem small, but there is a color illustration on just about every page. The only problem I could think of is that there are no descriptions about any of the paintings, just the title. A small section in the back tells of how the ocean has inspired the artist. (It also says this book was originally published in Japan and was a bestseller there). The paintings often include ocean waves, sea life, or space. All are rendered in beautiful color. They are similar to the works of Jim Warren or Wyland. I recommend this book to anyone who is even slightly interested in art or the ocean.

Parts of this book seemed to me to be imitations of better fantasy. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings will know what I mean.

I got this book for a birthday when I was younger and loved it. I read it over and over and over again. Now, a decade later, I just finished reading it again and still loved it. Maybe it is partly the nostalgia, but I think that it is an enjoyable read for any young person and highly reccommend it. It's too bad it's out of print!

This is one of my favorite books. It can be read over and over again and each time you will find something new or something that you forgot the last time you read it. A definite must for those people who like to read fantasy/romances but don't like the story to dwell only on the romance.

I loved the mixed of locations and interests related with the story line. I got my copy as a gift prior to going on vacation. I almost finished the entire story by the time I had my first poolside drink. I read it again before getting back to Chicago.

I picked this book up while on vacation in Key West. It was great. The characters were believable and I love the hero Eddie. Makes me want to go find myself a fireman!

Eddie the fireman could give James Bond a run for his money. This novel takes you on quite an adventure through some incredible locales - Key West, The Caribbean, a tropical island off of Cuba.

I would love to receive any comments on this book or the story - my grandmother tells me of him all the time!

The pilot was a rude but polite man. He gave me shelter w/pay. They finally put him to rest 8 yrs ago. I need a copy of the book. @ 25 S lazona #18 Mesa AZ 85204

When Ernie Gann wrote this book in 1944 he had just come to realize that the love of flying was going to consume his life. Gann was a left-seat man and he was able to tranfer his need for perfection to the printed page. A veteran pilot will find no flaws or mistakes or stupid exaggerations in the technical descriptions in this book. Ernie Gann will put you in the left seat and make you sweat. He will give you the sense and the thrill of flying a four-engine transport under dubious conditions in 1944. I am sorry this book is out of print. That is truly a shame. GANN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE ERNIE GANN.