The Stowaway
A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica
1 of 1 copy available
It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet's final frontier?
Everyone wanted in on the adventure. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged to be taken along as mess boys, and newspapers across the globe covered the planning's every stage. And then, the night before the expedition's flagship set off, Billy Gawronski—a mischievous, first-generation New York City high schooler, desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business—jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard.
Could he get away with it?
From the soda shops of New York's Lower East Side to the dance halls of sultry Francophone Tahiti, all the way to Antarctica's blinding white and deadly freeze, author Laurie Gwen Shapiro "narrates this period piece with gusto" (Los Angeles Times), taking readers on the "novelistic" (The New Yorker) and unforgettable voyage of a plucky young stowaway who became a Roaring Twenties celebrity, a mascot for an up-by-your bootstraps era.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 16, 2018 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781508244578
- File size: 185962 KB
- Duration: 06:27:25
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Shapiro's story of Billy Gawronski stowing away on Richard Byrd's expedition to the South Pole in 1928 is an old-fashioned adventure yarn that harks back to the bravado of polar expeditions. Narrator Jacques Roy is clear and authoritative, befitting the heroic age. Billy's story is full of daring and pluck, overcoming obstacles, and generating sensational newspaper headlines. In Billy's first attempt at stowing away, he swims a mile in the Hudson River. Discovering him, along with two other stowaways, the crew quickly rousts them all out. After three attempts, Byrd gives the lad a shot, and Billy heads to Antarctica as a mess boy. While more boldness and enthusiasm would have better matched the author's tone, Roy expresses the story's wry humor. A.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine -
November 13, 2017
In this true-life adventure yarn, filmmaker Shapiro reconstructs the story of Billy Gawronski, who captured the boundless optimism of the American national psyche in the lead up to the Great Depression when, in 1928, he attempted to stow away on a ship headed to the Antarctic. The enthusiastic 18-year-old was caught trying to sneak onboard three times before he could finally convince his hero, commander Richard Byrd, to let him join as a mess boy aboard the Eleanor Bolling en route to the South Pole. Shapiro interweaves snippets of Russell Owen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the expedition for the New York Times into the main narrative, which tracks Billy’s progression from being a reckless stowaway to commanding a ship in WWII. In the characters of Billy and his shipmates, Shapiro finds a “microcosm of American barriers and dreams.” This coming-of-age story about a strong-willed boy with an insatiable appetite for adventure is evocative of the Hardy Boys and will appeal to both adult and young adult readers.
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