Small Craft Advisory: A Book About the Building of a Boat

The author explores his obsession with boats, and describes his years of often hilarious boating adventures

Even readers who deem themselves confirmed landlubbers will warm to this charming memoir. Rubin, founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, author and professor of English, has had an affinity for boats all his life. He doesn't require long voyages; like Kenneth Grahame's Water Rat, he enjoys "simply messing about in boats." Rubin built his first boat when he was 13, to ply the creeks and marshes around Charleston, S.C.; since then he has owned a succession of sail- and powerboats, most of which have given him trouble. In his mid-60s, he made the decision to have a small wooden cabin cruiser built to his specifications. As he watches the boat take shape, Rubin reflects on his life. When the Algonquin was finished--trials run, adjustments made--Rubin drove 150 miles just to assure himself that she was there, a reaction that most other boat owners can recognize. In addition, Rubin offers the fine local color of coastal North Carolina.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the vantage of his mid-60s, critic, writer, and retired teacher Rubin (The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree, p. 997) offers a pleasantly rambling memoir about his lifelong romance with boats and about the building of what he suspects will be his last one, the wooden-hulled 24-footer Algonquin. As a young boy in Charleston, S.C., who lived on a river near the sea but couldn't swim a stroke, Rubin tacked together his first leaky skiff and tasted the romance of free movement on the water. Rubin never did learn to swim--a failure about which he's got some typically funny and modestly exploratory things to say--but from that time on he was never without a boat, or far from one. Entering retirement, and having gotten his children through college, he's now able to afford a boat that's an end-of-life equivalent of that childhood skiff--a craft at last that he can design and have built exactly the way he wants it. The result is the sturdy and unpretentious Algonquin, modeled after the harbor workboats that infatuated Rubin as a boy, and her construction from keel up (the boat is named for the publishing company of which Rubin is founder, and also for a coastal liner his father once took passage on) gives the author occasion to reminisce about his lifetime of boats before this one, with conversational side trips into books, places, the meaning of boats and travel, and even--by means of bits of family history that make up some of the most readable pages of this readable book--the psychology of risk-taking and the emotional roots of Rubin's constant but often impractical love of water and boats. Though maybe not casting its lines to quite the same historical breadth as Witold Rybczynski's The Most Beautiful House in the World (1989), this offers itself as a worthy and natural companion to that other andante and evocative memoir of the building of something much loved. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rubin ( The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree: A Literary Gallimaufry , LJ 9/1/91) is a retired distinguished professor of literature, founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, and the author of numerous articles and 40 books. He also loves boats, especially unpretentious workboats, and has owned a dozen of them in his 67 years. He built a boat when he was 13, owned many used ones, and finally in 1990 had a new wooden 24-foot boat hand built for him. From his childhood boat to his latest one, the experience of boating has been an act of liberation, an elemental freedom which provides a theme for this memoir. His affection for old or old-style boats provides a noncompetitive counter to the stress and ambition of academic and business life. In describing the building of his boat he is describing the building of his life, reasserting the shaping value of memory and imagination. This gracefully written contemplation should be welcomed even in public libraries far from the sea.
- Roland Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.