Customer Reviews

Come Hell on High Water

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

When I heard the author discuss this book on Late Night with Tom Snyder, I immediately jumped out of bed and ordered it from Amazon. I wish I hadn't. This was a journalist who sailed around the world on a cargo ship. Actually, it was a converted Russian ice-breaker. The journey is evidently one of introspection, and he shouldn't have bothered with the small amount of material he had to examine. He whines and complains and snivels until you wish he had fallen overboard. Too damn little about the ship and too damn much about himself. That Jaynes chose to read War and Peace on his journey was ironic. When I slugged through Tolstoy, my only goal for the last third of the tome was just to finish it and get it over with. I can say the same thing about the last third of Come Hell on High Water. There were some great moments, mostly when Jaynes discusses his career as a journalist. Some of those anecdotes were great. Jaynes should write that book.

Pretty lame, as books go. I read the whole thing and at the end felt like I'd been had. Is airing your every selfish thought now qualified as literature? If you think not, save your money.

Who cares? I wish I could talk to one of the shipmates. I bet this guy was a real jerk the whole time out.

I could write a better book, but I'm not chummy with the pinhead publishing crowd. Pure bilge.

I wondered why this book got published. Jaynes seems to have gone on a boring trip, and he doesn't have much too say. So he resorts to making fun of his elderly shipmates, and giving us his interpretations on War and Peace. I'm surprised that, as a reporter, Jaynes couldn't have suppressed his ego a little more and discovered more about the souls and characters that lied beneath the surface things that annoyed him -- Ernie's endless talking about Okinawa; Peter's cheapness and constant counting. His egocentrism becomes absurdly obvious by the end of the book. He talks about a crew member whose face is scarred from a horrible accident. Then, he writes something along the lines of, "Oh, did I forget to mention that?" Geez, maybe that guy's story might have been a little more interesting than the conversation with Toxic Jane when she tells Greg what an interesting, intelligent man he is. It's amazing how many times Jaynes has to tell us he's smarter than his shipmates. (It comes up again in the interview available here - he talks about having more IQ points.) Even when he's deriding himself, it's done in a vain way -- Oh, what a rogue I am. I've made it a policy this year to finish books I start, to give them a chance until the final page. Were it not for this pledge, I never could have gotten through this tedious, mean-spirited book. He hates fat people as well as the elderly. Witness his reaction to a crew member reporting another man on board had sex with one of the fat Russian stewardesses. Writes Jaynes: I imagine for a moment having sex with this woman. But I can't put it together. Science would be against such cross-pollination.

The subtitle is accurate. This is one of the very rare times when I really resent having spent money on a book. The tone varies from judgmental to whiny, with occasional detours into the downright bitchy. Three observations: 1} The author spends well in excess of 100 days afloat without, it seems, ever being aware of the ocean, since he only mentions looking at it once. This I find amazing! 2.) Perhaps it is the fact that he is admittedly fighting an alchohol problem, but he riccochets between inebriation and a very bloody-minded sobriety throughout. Neither is interesting or edifying. 3.) Toward the end of the voyage he decamps to the crew's mess to escape his fellow passengers and expresses great perplexity that they seem to be unaware of, or indifferent to, his absence. No reader will share his confusion. If he is this crochety at 47, I suspect he will be very much worse than his much-complained-of geriatric fellow passengers at their age.

At the very beginning of the book, he goes to the library to check out other books by mariners, voyagers and passengers. Now there is a list!... I would recommend each and every one in preference to this. Among the most delightful are "Nothing Can Go Wrong", which is laughing-out-loud wonderful, and Christopher Buckley's "Steaming to Bamboola". This last is by an author with a truly good ear, wit, curiosity and humanity. None of which, apparently, has Mr. Jaynes. Perhaps it was the alchohol. Perhaps he was depressed. In either case, I wish he hadn't chosen to write a book about it.

(John McPhee's "Looking for a Ship" is also, like all of his others, a very, very good book. Another wonderful maritime author is Tristan Jones. Any and all of his books are a joy. Finally, although I'm afraid it is now out-of-print, there is Farley Mowat's "The Boat Who Wouldn't Float." It's a treasure!)

Moderately entertaining to occasionally very funny, this book revealed more about Mr. Jaynes than his fellow passengers and crew members. At its most basic, it is a very sad book. Mr. Jaynes' easy resorts to sarcasm and two-dimensional characterizations of the people he met along his journey left me wanting to know more about these people once the cheap laugh at their expense had faded. Mostly, I noticed his incredible misogyny. From his ambivalence toward his wife and marriage, to his constant references to native women as their body parts to his adoration of his daughter as the incubator of his grandSON, I found his inability to connect with women as human beings very sad. His attitude is usually noticeable in members of the "older generation" but he's a Boomer, yet! Where was he when the women's movement happened? Probably in Africa digging up dirt on Dian Fossey. Hope he has a good shrink.

Sullen is not the word I would attach to this diary. Petty or Bitchy would be closer to the point. Mr. Jaynes writes as if he thinks himself witty and clever. Though some may appreciate his brash sense of humor, I did not. He tells of his Camp Granada-like voyage at sea with ten elderly English-speaking passengers, a Russian crew and British officers as if he were the only decent person on board. His superior attitude immediately crushes any observation that might otherwise have been amusing. He calls the ship the "Anti Betty Ford" but seems to feel justified in believing himself sober, though time and again he falls off the wagon and engages in disgusting antics while his wife waits for him patiently in New York. Once again I was duped by a book advertising itself as funny, when it is nothing more than the ravings of a smart-ass.

I don't have much to add to the other 1 and 2 star reviews. Really no humor (black or otherwise) in this book. If the author read his memoir before sending it to the publisher he at least has courage to reveal to the world what a sad and lonely life he leads. If you are looking for bile leavened with humanity then read Mencken or P.J. O'Rourke.

I always loved Jaynes when he wrote for the NY Times and my files are filled with clippings of his articles which I share with my feature-writing students. I enthusiastically bought his book and kicked myself for doing so after the first ten pages. The main focus of the book is how Jaynes can make fun of the passengers with whom he travels. He clearly hates women, old people, and fat people--to name just a few. Jaynes went out to find himself. I wonder if he likes what he found. I didn't.

Horrible, boring, and completely uninteresting book about a subject with so much potential: sea travel. Jaynes mostly complains about his fellow passengers amid his vanilla tales about various port stops. Do not waste your money!!!