Stargazing:Memoirs Of a Young Lighthouse Keeper(年轻的灯塔看守者)

In 1973, Glasgow-born Hill impulsively dropped out of art school to train as a lighthouse keeper at a series of remote outposts off Scotland's coast. He was, he recalls, the very image of the teenage baby boomer: longhaired, scruffy, dragging his rock 'n' roll tapes around everywhere. Yet he appears to have enjoyed himself immensely, spending weeks in close quarters with a handful of much older men, listening to their anecdotes and learning how to cook huge meals. The biggest problem with this loose, digressive account is that that's pretty much all they did other than keep the lights on. There are some amusing scenesâ?"one lighthouse crew's obsession with the televised Watergate hearings; a game of Scrabble in which only nautical terms are allowedâ?"but the pace is otherwise slow moving. While that sometimes makes for remarkable character studies, the narrative is burdened by Hill's grandiose faith in the significance of his generational moment. As a result, the memoir reads more like an elegy for his lost youth than one for the lighthouse keepers who would soon be replaced by automated technology. Furthermore, American readers will struggle to make sense of the references to 1970s BBC programming, which serve as hooks to describe nearly everyone Hill meets (the book was published in the U.K. last year). At least it's easy to grasp the Scots dialect; the gruff men who speak it hold much of the tale's vitality. In contrast, Hill's more direct efforts to wax charmingly nostalgic sound too often merely pretentious, like the sort of pompous middle-aged prattle Hill would have fled from if he were still 19.

Introduction - Ahoy!
Part One - How I Landed the Job
　The Tavern Bar
　The Interview
　Getting There: By Train, Boat and Tractor
Part Two - Pladda: Learning the Ropes
　The Mysteries of the Light Chamber
　Instructions for a Nuclear War
　Better than an All-Day-Breakfast
　Summer of the Creep
　Cooking up a Storm
　A Change of Crew
　Heard Chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay"
　Great Chieftain o' the Pudding Race
　A Brief History of Lighthouses
　Shore Leave I: A Surfeit of Choice
Part Three - Ailsa Craig
　Paddy's Milestone
　Rock of Ages
　The Lost World
　The Island Visitors
　Fire bombs in Dresden - Mackerel off Ailsa Craig
　Sex in the Bush
　Light Without Flesh
　Shore Leave II: The Edinburgh Festival
Part Four - Hyskeir
　The Seamens Mission, Oban - The Whirleybirds
　The Dalek Invasion of Hyskeir
　Nautical Scrabble
　Hitchcock Revisited
　Postscript
　Ocean Necklace