Stargazing: Memoirs of a Lighthouse Keeper

By Peter Hill
Reviewed by Sharma Krauskopf and rated

When Peter Hill, a lackadaisical student at Dundee College of Art, answered an advert in "The Scotsman" seeking full-time lighthouse keepers, little did he imagine that within a month he would be living with three men he didn't know in a lighthouse on Pladda, a small remote island off the west coast of Scotland. He was 19, it was 1973 and, with his head fed by Vietnam, Zappa, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Watergate and Coronation Street, Hill was to spend the next six months working on various Scottish lighthouses, "keeping" with all manner of unusual and fascinating people. Within thirty years this way of life was to have disappeared entirely. If ever a book deserved four stars this one does. I could not put it down and read it in one sitting.