Word: dark
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sailing." The sailors' skill is astonishing. "These are guys," an observer tells Lundy, "who can go downwind in 30 knots of wind, surfing on 20-ft. seas, carrying a spinnaker and full mainsail. And in those conditions they'll jibe the boat, with the spinnaker--at night, in the dark, alone!" Getting home alive was victory enough in the 1996-'97 race. Sixteen boats started from Biscay; nine finished. A Canadian sailor, Gerry Roufs, vanished in the Southern Ocean like a distant light winking out. The elaborate communications web binding Roufs' boat to the race's land handlers simply went...
Perhaps I'm being hasty. Who knows if the thing will really work? Still, I'd hate to be 3Com. Its venerable Palm line is under siege from an army of cheap digital assistants that run the competing Windows CE operating system. And last week a dark horse arrived from Psion Inc., a company based in England whose palmtops are especially popular outside the U.S. The 12.5-oz. device is the Psion 5mx ($549, list) and runs on a clever 32-bit operating system called Epoc, which has legions of devotees, just like Palm's OS. Epoc, you should know...
...third book, Dark Wind: A Survivor's Tale of Love and Loss (Atlantic Monthly Press; 225 pages; $23), author Gordon Chaplin is an Ishmael--perhaps merely an incompetent--who lives after the boat goes down and, haunted, tells the story...
...embark upon "an illicit, dangerous romance." In 1989, after years of landlocked child-rearing (four daughters between them), they leave their marriages and decide, like the owl and the pussycat, to set off to sea in the 36-ft. double-ended motor-sailor Lord Jim. Throughout the chronicle blow dark gusts of both families' anger and disapproval--bad emotional weather that is the underlying motif of Chaplin's memoir, even when tropical sun shines on the romantic fugitives...
...Dark Wind, a heartbreaking, infuriating book, draws its narrative power from the reader's ambivalence about whether to weep with Chaplin or break his neck...