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Sparky Enea (As told to Audry Lynch), "With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez"

Started January 29 � Finished January 29, 2002; 78 pages. Posted 30 January 2002

Like most characters in Steinbeck�s works, Doc from the "Cannery Row" novels was based on a real person, in this case a marine biologist named Ed Ricketts. In one of Steinbeck�s lesser-known works, �The Log from the Sea of Cortez,� he details an expedition down to Mexico to collect marine samples. Many of the stories therein are cute and/or endearing, and overall, for a book that deals with things of a scientific matter, is pretty damn entertaining.

But throughout the work, you only occasionally hear about anybody else who went with them on the trip, and if it weren�t for some memory-searching, it would almost be possible to think the two went by themselves.

Well, there were other people on that trip, and Enea was one of them. Publishing this book in 1991, long after both Steinbeck's and Ricketts� deaths, he found a way to make some money off of it.

Though I shouldn�t spite Enea for this. Enea�s just a shipmate with little education who ended up as a professional caddy. It probably never occurred to him to try and publish a book. The real leach is Audry Lynch, who from the text, obviously sat and listened to him spin yarns about the trip and tried to clean it up for publication. The problem is she has neither Steinbeck�s skill nor insight, and the entire piece comes off as clumsy.

In addition, she has no skill for transcribing dialog. Her short and vacuous biography blurb at the end states nothing about her professional career, but it�s obvious she�s never done journalism. In that field, there are strict rules about what you can and cannot change, only sparsely allowing corrections in grammar or lapses of thoughts.

Enea, for the most part, is course and nearly the perfect stereotype of a man who has spent most of his life on a boat, and occasionally Lynch lets these idiosyncrasies through in her transcription. But then in the next sentence she cleans up his speech, and attributes words that I�d bet dollars to doughnuts he�s never used in his life. Maybe it would have been harder to notice if she wasn�t so sloppy with her style.

And speaking of style, I can�t believe how many errors there are in this book. I�ve never heard of the publisher (Sand River Press), but there�s a list of four other books they�ve released, so hopefully they fired their copy editor after this one was completed. I mean, Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ, there are at least seven basic punctuation errors, and this is a short book! She even gets a title for one of Steinbeck�s books wrong! What the hell is that?

Still, the tales Enea tells are interesting, even if Steinbeck already wrote two of them (with more style and insight) in �Sea of Cortez.� He also makes charges that Steinbeck occasionally �went back to writing fiction� in writing about the trip. Yeah, nice charge to make, since Steinbeck and Ricketts are both long-dead and can�t answer, especially when you consider that Enea admits he spent most of his time drinking whiskey and going to whorehouses.

All in all: Cute, short and sporadically entertaining, despite the dreadful copy editing, but it�s still only for Steinbeck fans, and even then, it's ...


Rating: ... only worth flea market prices.

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