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The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea | 
 enlarge | Author: Mary South
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $5.78
You Save: $8.17 (59%)
New (36) Used (11) from $5.66
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 61810
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 006074703X
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780060747039
ASIN: 006074703X
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
At forty, Mary South had a beautiful home, good friends, and a successful career in book publishing. But she couldn't help feeling that she was missing something intangible but essential. So she decided to go looking for it . . . at sea. Six months later she had quit her job, sold the house, and was living aboard a forty-foot, thirty-ton steel trawler she rechristened Bossanova. Despite her total lack of experience, South set out on her maiden voyage—a fifteen-hundred-mile odyssey from Florida to Maine—with her one-man, two-dog crew. But what began as the fulfillment of an idle wish became a crash course in navigating the complicated byways of the self.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Praying to Poseidon February 15, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
While I respect the author's courage to make the life change she did as I read the book I felt an undercurrent of sadness and depression about her. When I read about her praying to Poseidon rather than to almighty Godand all of the alcoholic drinking, I then understood why I was feeling this way. I put down this book and began to read something else that to me was more uplifting.
Jane C. Kramer
 Would Have Loved to Make the Actual Trip January 3, 2008
I enjoyed Mary's story VERY much. I was surprised to learn she had been a book editor because I was distracted in the beginning chapters by many sentence fragments and run-on "sentences". I learned it was bad form, if not poor grammar to begin a sentence with the word "And". I was also confused at some points while trying to follow the story line: Mary skipped the family Thanksgiving for a warm weather trip South...but later in the story, she claims to have visited her aging grandmother in upstate New York over that same Thanksgiving? Maybe I'm reading too literally. I greatly admire her spirit of adventure and her courage in sharing her emotional life with us. I'm left wondering, though: what if Lars had invited her to sail to Europe? Would she have accepted that challenge/invitation?
Leave your politics onshore, Mary! October 13, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was a terrific book on many levels and while I
would not hesitate to recommend it, parts offended me.
Why was it necessary to contaminate its freshness with
your politics? Why the references to NPR and the usual
knee jerk reactions to Bush and the war on terrorism?
I think it'd have been suffice to just reveal that you
are a liberal Democrat. No problem there but why date
this memoir with your preferences and, it appears,
your PC prejudices? I really didn't need that to enjoy your
seafaring midlife adventures. Take care of your doggies!
 the cure for anything is salt water September 21, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea
As a reader whose only experience with boats is a few crossings on the Staten Island Ferry, I still found myself hooked from the beginning of THE CURE FOR ANYTHING IS SALT WATER. Not only because it is a very funny book and a great story about leaving corporate life for the sea, but also because of the sharp reflections on the impermanent yet invaluable aspects of life and relationships.
Helen Ward, Brooklyn, NY
 The Cure for This Book is More Salt Water August 28, 2007
10 out of 16 found this review helpful
Perhaps I should have done more homework. The book I read wasn't exactly the book that I thought I had bought. The subtitle, "How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea" gives a pretty good clue, though. There are essentially two parts to this book. The first is the story of a woman who experiences a mid-life crisis at work and in relationships, and goes forth to seek true happiness. The second is the story of this same woman looking for that happiness in buying a boat and going to sea. I had thought the book was really more the latter, but the story turns out to be more the former.
THE CURE FOR ANYTHING IS SALT WATER is competently written, as one should expect from a former book editor. The book is interesting, and the story told without artifice. When Mary South tells of her sudden, almost irrational interest in boats while living well inland in Pennsylvania, her experience will strike a chord with every boatstruck reader. But South's book is not likely to meet the needs of the boat or sailing enthusiast. It's not that she doesn't take her newfound interest seriously--nobody who quits her job and sells her house to buy a boat should be regarded as simply a dilettante (even if she doesn't take traditional methods of navigation seriously)--it's just that she doesn't write about boating with much passion beyond her love for her particular boat. What should be the centerpiece of the book, her voyage up the Eastern Seaboard, is reduced to a series of good days, bad weather, mishaps, bars, and some occasional local color. When it comes to boating, her prose fails to capture the poetry of the experience.
The reader learns that the real point of this book is to describe Mary South's midlife crisis, in particular, her losing interest in her career as a book editor and her being troubled by a lack of permanence in her intimate relationships. This in itself might be the clay from which a story might be shaped, but the effort falls short, clodlike. South, despite her humorous turns, tends towards the ad hominem comment: "My boss was a micromanager with an imagination that was significantly smaller than the stick up her butt" (p. 5). A Christian school administrator of the boating school South attends makes her wonder "what kind of crackpot school I had committed myself to"; this is followed by a rather poor joke on theodicy (p. 35). A boating classmate is described as a very intelligent guy "though a smart Republican is an oxymoronic concept to me" (p. 56). When an elderly couple out rowing express concern for the author's dogs, they are disdainfully dismissed as "Biff" and "Muffy" (p. 176). South's tendency towards personal attack, combined with her refrain of seeking isolation on her boat, leads one to think she's a misanthrope. But here's the thing: I don't think she is; she just gravitates to ridicule as a literary tool of humor. However you slice it, though, it's not very appealing.
In the last part of the book, South, who describes herself as a lesbian, discusses her surprising affair with a man. Her boat at this point is but a piece of inconvenient furniture. You may, like me, find yourself at this point happy that your voyage with South is nearly over.
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