If you find the text too small to read on this website, press the CTRL button and,
without taking your finger off, press the + button, which will enlarge the text.
Keep doing it until you have a comfortable reading size.
(Use the - button to reduce the size)

Today's quote:

Saturday, September 7, 2024

The Millionaire Castaway

 

David Glasheen on facebook

 

This book is really quite disappointing. I had bought it because I know (of) David Glasheen and because I had expected a little more from a chap who has spent over twenty years all by himself on a desert island. You know, insights into why we are here and what life it all about.

Instead, as Somerset W. Maugham put it in his story, "German Harry", "If what they tell us in books were true his long communion with nature and the sea should have taught him many subtle secrets. It hadn't."

 

The Millionaire Castaway: The Incredible Story of How I Lost
My Fortune but Found New Riches Living on a Deserted Island
The book is dedicated to David's daughter Erika Ruby (10/2/78 - 20/3/13) who died an untimely death on the mainland at Lockhart River just across from the island
-o-
Click here for a preview

 

Actually, the prologue about social distancing and the COVID pandemic, dated 7 April 2020, and added to the 2020 reprint after I had already bought it, is perhaps the best and most thoughtful part of the book.

In fairness to good ol' Dave, he may have done a better job and bared it all, had he written the book himself. Which he didn't; someone called Neil Bramwell wrote it for him, and in the retelling all that got lost.

Like Maugham's story, David's may end similarly: "I foresaw the end. One day a pearl fisher would land on the island and German Harry would not be waiting for him, silent and suspicious, at the water's edge. He would go up to the hut and there, lying on the bed, unrecognisable, he would see all that remained of what had once been a man."

David (or is it Neil?) closed the prologue like this: "Here's hoping this pandemic will bring out a little of the castaway in all of us." Not in me!


Googlemap Riverbend