On 1/14/2017 John Kohnen wrote:
The author began collecting wine corks after his first boatbuilding effort as a child sank on launching day. Corks float. He grew up, mostly, and eventually became a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. Getting burned out by the politics of Washington, DC, he decided it was finally time to build that cork boat. A monumentally crazy idea. It takes a LOT of wine corks to make a boat, and scrounging them up was quite a task. In the end he had to buy some to supplement the corks he'd collected over the years, and cadged from friends and bartenders. But the boat got built, out of 165,321 corks, held together with 15,000 rubber bands, and he floated in her down the Douro River in Portugal. Cork and wine country.
Pollack doesn't take himself too seriously, but the cork boat project meant a lot to him, and turned into a fine adventure. He writes about it in an entertaining way that keeps you turning the pages. Along the way the book takes excursions into politics, history, corks, rubber bands, and more. Cork Boat is a Good Read. Much, much better than I expected from a book about a crazy stunt.
Hardcover. 291 pages.