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Hell-Bent for Adventure:
Coal Mines & Goldmines, U-Boats & Bill Clinton's Mail by Jack Mahaney Two Reviews 09/11/2004 by Patrick Killough NOTE: Like me, my new friend Jack
Mahaney lives at the Highland
Farms Retirement Community in Black Mountain, North Carolina. This
memoir is Jack's first book and was published when he was already
beyond 90 years old. He is preparing a sequel.
(REVIEW # ONE) for barnesandnoble.com RATING: **** HEADING: Be Tom Sawyer Forever That ever vigorous Western North Carolina nonagenarian Jack Mahaney says that, if he had played it safe instead of placing himself over and over in harm's way, he would have led a pretty hum-drum life. He therefore encourages younger readers to "leave your safe harbors and venture out into the salty air of the open sea" (EPILOGUE, p. 186) No reader need replicate Walter Mitty and stay locked in our timid imagination. Like Jack Mahaney he can volunteer to read Presidential love letters, observer the nose-blowing techniques of Amer-Indians in Venezuela or inspect agricultural products on luxury liners. Or he might play it safe and stay in an ancestral coal-mining community and die not only unsung but young as well. Mr Mahaney's quickly told tales are for sipping. They are witty with the wit of irony. They are self-deprecating while at the same time inviting the Tom Sawyer in Everyman to "be a boy again." RELATED TITLES YOU HAVE ENJOYED: Lewis W. Green, OF HUMAN INTEREST. John Steinbeck, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY: IN SEARCH OF AMERICA I am Patrick Killough and I live surrounded by good writers. ______________________________ (REVIEW # TWO) for amazon.com MY RATING: **** Hell-Bent for Adventure: Coal Mines & Goldmines, U-Boats & Bill Clinton's Mail by Jack Mahaney ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A late blooming "teller of tales", September 12, 2004 Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews It was imagination and healthy self-interest that drove young Jack Mahaney to leave the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania and take a train to college and freedom from what bode fair to become a short life and painful death. Imagination and a need for danger then propelled him to a stint in the Navy in World War II, in charge of a 30-man gun crew on various merchant vessels. In Mombasa Mr Mahaney dared Masai warriors dancers to do him in. Later as an agricultural inspector he ate, drank and sometimes even slept well on luxury ocean liners . He saved California from fruit flies inadvertently smuggled from Hawaii to San Diego by U.S. Navy cooks. Even as Jack Mahaney aged and slowed a bit, he still had the energy to join U.S. missionaries in the Venezuelan Amazon where he tried in vain to teach primitive Indians how to leap beyond slash and burn agriculture and plant more nourishing crops. Later, before he retired to Western North Carolina, Jack Mahaney's last hurrah was as a volunteer in the White House, screening and pigeonholing love letters sent to then President Bill Clinton from adoring women everywhere. Nonagenarian Jack Mahaney writes as clearly and punchily as Ernest Hemingway. Like Robert Louis Stevenson and his 20 years younger Mountain Carolinas contemporary Lewis W. Green (author of his journalistic reminiscenses, OF HUMAN INTEREST), Mr Mahaney is a born "teller of tales," a sometimes caustic observer of the passing parade but more often a good humored log keeper on board The Ship of Fools. He is a late but valued arrival in that increasingly crowded "nest of singing birds" of poets, novelists and other writers living in or near Asheville, North Carolina. -OOO- Patrick Killough Black Mountain, NC 09/12/2004 =-=-=-=-=-=-=- |