Stargazing
Memoirs Of A Young Lighthouse Keeper
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A moving and hilarious memoir of life on three Scottish lighthouses - and a beautiful tribute to a long-lost vocation that will always capture the imagination.
In 1973, Peter Hill was a 19 year old hippy art student when he was interviewed for the job of Relief A moving and hilarious memoir of life on three Scottish lighthouses - and a beautiful tribute to a long-lost vocation that will always capture the imagination.
Lighthouse Keeper by The Commissioners of the Northern Lights in Edinburgh. For the next 12 months he would work on 3 legendary lighthouses off the coast of Scotland. From these rocky outcrops and uninhabited islands Peter Hill came of age listening to the tales of older keepers, all of whom had lived fascinating lives around the world. They took turns at keeping watch throughout the night in the light chambers, and by day– when not laying lobster creels and attending to their idiosyncratic hobbies– they kept in touch with the outside world through television.
This was the year that Vietnam burned, the Watergate hearings were beamed in live by satellite from Washington, and strains of Jimi Hendrix lifted the roof. The contrast with the age- old world of the lighthouse keepers could not be more marked– Peter Hill has captured the magic of both worlds and granted us the privilege of learning fascinating details about the history and legend of this now defunct but perennially romantic and poetic vocation.
Laugh out loud funny, poetic, poignant and endlessly fascinating, Star Gazing is a wise and wistful tribute to a time and a way of life that no longer exists– but one that will always capture the imagination and stir the soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1973, Glasgow-born Hill impulsively dropped out of art school to train as a lighthouse keeper at a series of remote outposts off Scotland's coast. He was, he recalls, the very image of the teenage baby boomer: longhaired, scruffy, dragging his rock 'n' roll tapes around everywhere. Yet he appears to have enjoyed himself immensely, spending weeks in close quarters with a handful of much older men, listening to their anecdotes and learning how to cook huge meals. The biggest problem with this loose, digressive account is that that's pretty much all they did other than keep the lights on. There are some amusing scenes one lighthouse crew's obsession with the televised Watergate hearings; a game of Scrabble in which only nautical terms are allowed but the pace is otherwise slow moving. While that sometimes makes for remarkable character studies, the narrative is burdened by Hill's grandiose faith in the significance of his generational moment. As a result, the memoir reads more like an elegy for his lost youth than one for the lighthouse keepers who would soon be replaced by automated technology. Furthermore, American readers will struggle to make sense of the references to 1970s BBC programming, which serve as hooks to describe nearly everyone Hill meets (the book was published in the U.K. last year). At least it's easy to grasp the Scots dialect; the gruff men who speak it hold much of the tale's vitality. In contrast, Hill's more direct efforts to wax charmingly nostalgic sound too often merely pretentious, like the sort of pompous middle-aged prattle Hill would have fled from if he were still 19.
