Reviews of Michael McCurdy Books from the New York Times
July 19, 1998"At Sea With the A B C's"
The Sailors Alphabet
By SUSAN BOLOTIN
I thought scratch art was done by preschoolers, not grown-ups. I can picture the kindergarten room still: little bodies hunched over paper, applying layer upon layer of crayon, eyes ever on the prize -- until that moment when, with great fierceness, the children would eclipse it all with a final coat of blackest Crayola. Only then would they be allowed to take the edge of a paper clip or the tip of a ballpoint or the tine of a plastic fork and start scratching. From the seas of ebony would soon arise crooked rainbows, variegated gardens, cheery houses with smoke curling from magical chimneys.
My mistake. ''The Sailor's Alphabet,'' illustrated by Michael McCurdy, a scratchboard version of a real 19th-century sea chantey, is a revelation. Each verse, from ''Oh, A is the anchor and that you all know'' to ''Z is the letter for which we've no place,'' comes with its own glorious piece of scratch art as rich in emotion as it is in detail, as surprising in its palette of blues and roses and yellows as it is in its craft. Each page creates a world, as sailors and nautical gear combine to work the ship, usually observed by a boy who may be a naval cadet, back in the 1830's, when a United States frigate would have been protecting the high seas from marauding pirates.
There's a lot of information on these pages -- definitions of keelsons and stilliards (i.e., steelyards) and such -- that might stretch the attention span of all but the most nautically hooked child. But any adults who have ever had a thing for the sea will love it. As for me, well, it made me want to start . . . scratching!
February 15, 1998
by Rebecca Pepper Sinkler
TRAPPED BY THE ICE:
Shackleton's Amazing Antarctic JourneyMichael McCurdy's plain-spoken text and understated pale palette of blues, lavenders and greens suit his story. The sketches of Shackleton's crew are appropriately grim. Imagine if you can the terror that must have gripped these men, stranded in the frozen seas with no hope of rescue, diminishing provisions, surrounded by waters where lurked hungry sea leopards. McCurdy captures not only the elemental fears but the daily grubbiness of adventure. ''The men smelled terrible,'' he writes. ''During their five and a half months on the ice they hadn't had a bath. Clothes were greasy and worn thin. . . . Hands were cracked from the cold and wind.''
The story gets far worse, with a 700-mile journey in open boats, a hurricane at sea, a landfall miles from human habitation and, finally, a mountain ridge to climb before reaching the whaling station where the journey ends. The great, and true, happy ending begins when the whaling station manager hears a knock at his door, opens it to find the shattered crew and the captain, who announces, simply, ''I'm Shackleton.''
If you wonder what drove Shackleton on his mad quest, you may be entirely confounded by Admiral Byrd, the great American explorer. Byrd, who commanded several American expeditions to the Antarctic, set out in 1934 to spend a solo winter there. In ''Black Whiteness,'' Robert Burleigh has used Byrd's diaries to great effect, chronicling the preparations of a bunker beneath the snow, the approach of the polar darkness, the terrible cold, Byrd's life-threatening illness, increasing claustrophobia, disorientation and panic and final rescue.
Where McCurdy's prose is simply sturdy, Burleigh's is richly poetic: ''There is also a terrible beauty,'' he writes. ''Afternoon skies that shatter 'like broken goblets' as tiny ice crystals fall across the face of the sun; blood-red horizons, liquid twilights, and pale green beams, called auroras, that wind in great waves through the towering dark.'' Walter Lyon Krudop's gloomy, mysterious paintings echo the inner state of a strange man on a strange mission.