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."
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-
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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!
