Required Reading

A runaway bestseller in France is now available in English through the brilliant translation of journalist William Rodarmor '68. It is published as a single autobiography titled Tamnta and the Alliance, by the renowned sailor Bernard Moitessier (Sheridan House). But Tamata is virtually two wonderful books in one. The engrossing first part of Tamata is set amid colonial Indochina, where the author was the rebellious son of a successful French merchant. Hardly out of his teens, he managed a rubber plantation, served in the marines, survived both Japanese and Viet Minh cruelty, and, bored with being an accountant for his father, embarked on adventures—including becoming the first person to circumnavigate the world nonstop and solo. Moitessier ended up settling in Papeete in 1970 and forming- a friendship with bis translator.

The book's second half should not be missed by any sailing enthusiast, of either the salt-seasoned or the armchair persuasion. Its intensely personal narrative scuds on a sea of sailing lore. We get details of boat building, rigging, construction, equipment, care, cruising, and dealing with rough weather- along with the kind of thoughts that swim through a man's mind in the midst of a silent ocean:; world peace, unilateral nuclear disarmament, changing the bloodthirsty lyrics of "La Marseillaise," making a world language but of 150 basic Chinese ideographs.

William Rodarmor, an adventurer himself, makes a fitting translator. A New Yorker who attained bilinguality at an early age, he graduated from Dartmouth in 1968, served in the U.S. Army as a Russian linguist, received a law degree from Columbia, and then quit the law in favor of crewing on a 40-foot ketch from Panama to Tahiti. Rodarmor has translated Moitessier's other bestseller, The Long Way, among other books, and having Earned an M.A. in journalism at Berkeley, is now managing editor of California Monthly, the U.C. Berkeley alumni magazine.

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