“In this memoir, Gene Kahn offers a fascinating study of small-boat sailing adventures in sight of Manhattan’s domineering skyline. Staged around voyages taking place over a fifteen-year period between 1978 and 1993, the book is both a valuable collection of adventures on Long Island Sound, the East River, and New York Bay (with an occasional slice of Caribbean warmth for good measure), and a beautifully written love story. Deep Water should prove popular among the gay community as well as being a valuable resource for boaters in, or visiting, the waters off New York City.”
-Anthony Dalton,
Author, Wayward Sailor: In Search of the Real Tristan Jones,
and Co-author of The Best of Nautical Quarterly, Vol. 1, The Lure of Sail
“DEEP WATER, A Sailor’s Passage is a powerfully moving memoir that charts the emotional landscape of a man with stark honesty and surprising candor. E. M. Kahn is as skilled at capturing the complex and shifting passions of life on the sea as those of the life of the heart.
Rarely have I read a book that so fearlessly confronts our personal and idiosyncratic responses to the painful losses that many of us enduring during the early cataclysmic years of AIDS and the difficult path forward as we find ways to love again. Ultimately this book offers a searching look at men’s quest for adventure – adventures of the sea, the heart, and the spirit.”
-Eric Rofes, PhD.
Author, Reviving The Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality
And Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic
“Long after they read it, so many people are going to carry this book around in their heart. Lovers of the sea, sailboats owners, older gay men who have loved someone younger, AIDS patients and their care givers, and even pet owners will find something in this exciting and poignant memoir that they can relate to.
“Even if you don’t know boating terminology, you can still smell the salty sea air and hear the shrieking of the seagulls. (A glossary of sailing terms is included at the book’s end.)
-Hal Campbell writes for the
web publication We The People (www.gaysonoma.com/wethepeople)
“Brisk and refreshing, DEEP WATER brings together the exhilaration of sailing and the mystery of love in a truly distinctive memoir. From navigating through treacherous fog on Cape Cod to negotiating the unruly seas of the West Indies, E. M. Kahn’s chronicle carries the reader along on a wave of affability and good humor, and always in the fine company of the author’s friends. A tale of love, loss, and renewal, the book also recounts the touching relationship between Kahn and his lover and the devotion and dignity embodied within it. Well-written and absorbing, DEEP WATER is highly recommended for those with a taste for the splendor of the sea and of the human spirit.”
-Marc E. Vargo, MS
Author, Noble Lives: Biographical Portraits of Three Remarkable Gay Men – Glenway Wescott, Aaron Copland and Dag Hammarskjold, and Scandal: Infamous Gay Controversies of the Twentieth Century
“Boats are demanding objects of affection. So are boy friends. This is a beautiful love story about both. Kahn’s memoir recounts his passion for the several boats he sailed around the turbulent waterways of New York City and Long Island, through Cape Cod’s hellish fogbanks, and among the island of the Caribbean. Any nautical romantic with a yen for the wild freedom of wind, sail, and sea will relish his tales of time spent aboard small boats. In a profoundly moving parallel story, Kahn also remembers his sometimes stormy but always sure romance with Kevin, a skittish, skinny young man he met in 1978; any gay man who grieves for a great love will share Kahn’s great loss. DEEP WATER is a powerful, poignant, and graceful story about sailing on through life – on another body of water, with another body at your side – after sorrow descends.”
-Richard Labonte writes for the web publication BookMarks@qsyndicate.com