Publishers Weekly
Most readers will never need to build their own boat, tin or otherwise, but this memoir rarely fails to delight and sometimes even informs. White passes his days building boats and his nights writing for publications like Wooden Boat and Messing About in Boats-not surprisingly, there's plenty of talk of keels, sterns, tumblehomes and beam ratios here. Mixed in are his observations on how television rots children's minds, and the ways in which the Enron scandal resembles cannibalism in the Pre-Columbian Antilles. Like many skilled storytellers, White wanders a bit. His childhood, which he spent building boats, getting into trouble and exploring the South's swamps and ponds, resembles his adult life, with the latter boasting deeper and more treacherous waters. In the chapter "King Tut," for example, White tires while waiting for his tugboat to clear the Mississippi's locks and decides to swim across the river to see a King Tut exhibit at the Sugar Bowl. After nearly being run over by an oil barge and losing all of his clothes, he does. There's no telling, of course, how much fact there is to these tales. According to the book's disclaimer, "none of these stories is true... not a single word." (May 14) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
White, owner of his own boat-building company and a contributor to WoodenBoat and Messing About in Boats, has put together an interesting collection of stories about his life in, under, on, and around boats. Ranging from his idyllic childhood exploring Florida's Gulf Coast and his native Georgia rivers to his navy stint in Puerto Rico to his North Gulf Intracoastal Waterway barge days, White offers stories that can be humorous and self-deprecating, as when he swims naked across the Mississippi River or "rescues" an ill-tempered snapping turtle. Although White possesses a degree in oceanography and points out the appropriate scientific names for most of the flora and fauna he encounters, his writing voice is conversational. It's also riddled with terms only a boating enthusiast would understand. There isn't an epiphany, and White certainly doesn't use his humorous escapades to delve into life's great mysteries, but he does instruct the reader on how to build a tin canoe. Recommended for public libraries where there is interest and for fans of Bailey White, the author's sister.-Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
White's debut takes (and gives) sheer delight in charting his evolution as a wooden-boat builder. Not on the Maine coast either, mind you, but down in the red hills of Georgia, among the ponds and little rivers, with excursions to the Gulf coast. This infuses a certain flavor to the proceedings, but White's brand of slow wisdom has core values that would puncture pretentiousness no matter what end of the Eastern seaboard he inhabited. It all started, he explains, during "those old wonderful wild and naked days" of youth, when he poked about in doubled-ended duck boats owned by his rich Yankee cousins, who would come to summer in the long-leaf pine forests of Georgia. Things really took off when the Navy stationed him in Puerto Rico. San Juan boat building was a matter of an axe, a machete, and wood, and the product's elemental purity bewitched him. Not that White is a purist-he is happy to tinker and try all sorts of boat stuff . . . well, maybe not fiberglass, but certainly outboards and metal screws-but he knows what gives him pleasure, and boats made of wood are central. Financially, such work is punishing, so he had to take employment elsewhere, often enough on water. The stories of his aquatic adventures provide him with so many asides that they pretty much make up this recounting: these tales are as tight and trim as his boats, paced to observe and reflect upon such curiosities as courting rituals in the Caribbean, building a tin canoe, teasing a Mississippi catfish with "toilet-seat-sized lips," or pulling a snapping turtle into a boat by mistake: "Eating the front of the boat up, she busted her way out from under the seat and headed aft." A graceful primer on life and how to sailthrough it with character, easy grace, and personal priorities all in a row. Agent: John Silbersack/Trident Media Group
