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Outside Magazine June 2001

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Books

A Voyage for Madmen, by Peter Nichols (HarperCollins, $26). In 1968 the Sunday Times of London sponsored the most audacious regatta in history: the Golden Globe, the first solo race around the world. Nine men entered a contest that would close the sextant age of sailing and open the era of high-tech adventure racing. One finished. Writer and sea hand Nichols recounts the strange fates of the winner, Robin Knox-Johnson, and the luckless eight—a mix of seasoned mariners and clueless landlubbers, from renowned French navigator Bernard Moitessier to British electrical engineer Donald Crowhurst, who barely made it out of the harbor. "Some of these chaps," warned British sailor Francis Chichester, who had touched off the round-the-world mania with his own single-handed 1967 circumnavigation, "don't know what they are letting themselves in for." Nichols ably narrates a fascinating tale of sailors done in by terrifying storms and intense loneliness, but it's his forays into nautical lore—the treachery and sanctity of Cape Horn, the vulnerability of a sailboat in modern shipping lanes—that bring the book alive. As for the race, one boat disintegrated off the coast of Brazil; 40-foot waves capsized another near the Cape of Good Hope; a third sank less than 1,000 miles from the finish. Moitessier got swept up by the Zen of the journey and ignored the fin ish line, completing a planet and a half before putting into port. But it is Crowhurst who remains indelibly linked to the race. Unprepared and sailing "a right load of plywood," he hatched a plan to fake global passage by hiding at sea for eight months, and sailed listlessly around the Atlantic, radioing false positions. The plan nearly worked, until the weight of his deception pitched him into madness. His yacht was found adrift, the man himself a presumed suicide—thus leaving the ocean to the true salts.—Bruce Barcott

Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City, by Anne Matthews (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22). Matthews (Where the Buffalo Roam) offers an urban bestiary, a feast of facts, interviews, and anecdotes suggesting that nature is turning up in radically unnatural New York. Her raw material is fascinating: Did you know that "raccoons have been seen teaching their kits to look both ways before crossing Manhattan streets"? Or that there are wild turkeys flying down Broadway ("making a left near Lincoln Center"), and coyotes heading into the Big Apple via the Major Deegan Expressway? Matthews's opening chapter—on migrating birds killed or stunned by skyscrapers and the birders who patrol Wall Street at dawn to save the dazed survivors—will astonish lifelong city dwellers, just as an informal poll of city-bred students ("Birds shouldn't be allowed in the city if they endanger us") will appall nature lovers. And her descriptions are charming: The plumage of a female peregrine falcon chick, hatched on the 27th floor of New York Hospital, is "the bright opaque white of bond paper"; the falcon "smells like pepper and hay." But for a journalism instructor who has taught at New York University, Matthews can be cavalier: Too many facts float free of attribution or context. We never learn, for example, who observed those pedagogically minded raccoons. And there are digressions on subjects covered better elsewhere (the black death, the razing of New York's old Penn Station). An argument so compelling—that America's urban spaces are being recolonized by nature—deserves better than conjecture and urban myth. —Caroline Fraser

New Books By Our Contributors
Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison And Other Urgent Inquiries into the Odd Nature of Nature: The Best of Outside Magazine's "The Wild File," edited by Hampton Sides (W.W. Norton/Outside Books, $14). Contributing editor and former Wild File columnist Sides gathers the best from seven years of questions and answers about the natural world, laying bare such mysteries as why ducks float, where the white goes when snow melts, and where we really get our expert answers (the Wild File Bunker, of course, a climate-controlled, scientist-swarmed cavern deep in the New Mexico mountains).

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission, by Hampton Sides (Doubleday Books, $25). Wild Filer Sides chronicles the daring April 1945 raid that freed 513 Bataan Death March survivors from Cabanatuan, a notorious Japanese prison camp in the Philippines.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People, by Susan Orlean (Random House, $25). This occasional Outside contributor's collection takes its title from "La Matadora Revisa Su Maquillaje," her 1996 Outside profile of Spanish bullfighter Cristina Sánchez.

Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life, by Bernd Heinrich (HarperCollins, $23). Biologist and ultra-marathoner Heinrich explores speed, evolution, and the thrill of the chase in his latest book, part of which appeared here last September.

Billy Ray's Farm: Essays From a Place Called Tula, by Larry Brown (Algonquin, $23). Mississippi original Brown maps a literary geography of bulls, tractors, coyotes, baby goats—and a blessed event called a fishgrab.

Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Lands, by Tad Friend (AtRandom.com; e-book, $10; paperback, $19). Friend's e-book includes, among other Outside articles, "Please Don't Oil the Animatronic Warthog," a skeptical look at Disney's Animal Kingdom.

The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories, by Donald Katz (AtRandom.com; e-book, $10; paperback, $15). Katz's collection of magazine writings finds the Outside contributing editor hanging with Jack LaLanne, Peter Beard, and the world champion of ferret-legging, a British sport involving the insertion of weasels down one's trousers.

Fraud, by David Rakoff (Doubleday, $22). In his first nonfiction collection, Outside's favorite urbanite joins a New Hampshire man on his 2,065th ascent of Mount Monadnock, and survives survival school in New Jersey, where the die-hard New Yorker is, for one brief, shining moment, "big man in Vole City."

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