Tall tales and other thoughts from storyteller, sailor and nomad Dennison Berwick. "Kuan Yin" is his 32-foot go-anywhere home.
Posted in Books/Language, Sailing on Sep 4th, 2010
Many people dream of sailing around the world in a small boat – and many more who have no desire whatever to actually go to sea enjoy the vicarious pleasures of a voyage through other people’s books.
Thankfully this has created a steady demand for books about nautical adventures that run the full spectrum from solo [...]
Posted in Books/Language on Jul 25th, 2010
When you hear the stunted, semi-grunting way many speak – and write! – these days, the language of a book such as The Elements of Style seems to come from a different planet. What’s the point of clarifying the correct usage of “which’ and “that” when someone can’t utter a sentence that doesn’t have f**k [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Life skills on Jun 10th, 2010
Journalist Michael Pollan has written three books on food. His newest (published in paperback in December 2009) is called “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”. It’s a list of guidelines about food – real food, how to identify it and know what is not food, but what Pollan calls “edible food-like substances”?
How conscious are you about [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Life skills, Reportage/Stories on May 1st, 2010
This book is one of the classic must-read books for any aspiring writer and it is one I have enjoyed reading and rereading over many years. Dorothea Brande wrote her ground-breaking book in the 1930s. Style of writing have changed enormously since then. But what it takes to become a writer has not. From my [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Reportage/Stories on Mar 10th, 2010
I certainly wasn’t the first to write a book about Ganga Ma (Mother Ganges), the holy river which flows across northern India. And I’m glad to see that I haven’t been the last. (Though I think I’m still the only foreigner to have walked the entire length of the river.)
Edmund Hilary took a jet boat [...]
Posted in Books/Language on Feb 26th, 2010
There was a time when books about business companies were staid and boring and read only by other historians. That age passed when popular authors such as Canadian Peter C. Newman wrote their biographies of some of the great companies of the world. Newman’s claim to fame, in this realm, is his two volume history [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Reportage/Stories on Feb 23rd, 2010
Any story might be simply summarized as – this happened, then this, then this happened. And that might be true for the way we tell our friends what we did today. But that is NOT storytelling if by that we mean telling a “story”. So what is a story? What it is not, is this [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Sailing on Feb 22nd, 2010
Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, is the most famous place for sailors – even amongst non-sailors. The mountainous seas, the near endless storms, the scores of lost ships and drowned sailors; this is a legendary place well respected even feared by all those who go to sea in boats (or ships). [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Sailing on Feb 13th, 2010
Shortly before the United States of America joined the Second World War, the American novelist John Steinbeck joined the marine biologist friend of his, Edward F. Ricketts, on a 4,000 mile voyage around the Baja Peninsula into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Steinbeck, who wrote “Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden”, wrote a [...]
Posted in Books/Language, Sailing on Feb 7th, 2010
Today we take ships and shipping for granted and are far more impressed by the size of an oil tanker or the container ship bringing our latest “must-have” gadget than the extraordinary system of shipbuilding, navigation, cargo handling and trade networks that demand and pay for such behemoths. And we are even less aware of [...]
"Serendipity" is the art of finding something valuable or delightful when you're not looking for it. It's how you might also define living life as an adventure - which is something I seek to do everyday - and accepting whatever happens.
