Roberts ponders his mortality while celebrating the freedom of wild places. A book for anyone who appreciates good adventure...
Veteran mountaineer and historian Roberts (The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest, 2015, etc.) looks once more at the question of why humans are so bent on scaling the world’s tall places.
Climbers have worried that the planet’s peaks are getting overcrowded ever since Petrarch ascended Mont Ventoux, and indeed readers could be forgiven for thinking that Roberts was among the last to live in the golden age of adventure and exploration. Take, for example, his first contact with a people hidden away in the depths of an island rainforest: “I had never been part of such a strange cultural interchange, and I covertly stared back, wondering, What are they thinking? Who do they think we are? Why do they think we’ve come?” Good questions all. In the main, this is an amiable if surely adventure-packed collection of yarns and historical oddments; who knew that one of the first organized mountaineering expeditions in the world involved a theologian, a carpenter, and the “official ladderman to the king”? Roberts is as home in libraries as he is on summits, and he explores the literature of mountaineering and some of its genre conventions, if not clichés: the use, for example, of “martial metaphors on every page supported a narrative that veered closer to melodrama than to understatement.” So it is with the books that mark a true golden age, that of Himalayan mountaineering, which Roberts closes off at 1964, books that center on a pair of daring climbers while scarcely acknowledging the vast support staff behind them. The author is more generous in writing of the great teams that figure in any expedition, and, he notes, expeditions are continuing, now with young climbers who appreciate their predecessors: “I no longer worry that the skills and technology of the current band of alpinists relegate the deeds of my own generation to the limbo of ‘pretty good for its time,’ ” he writes.
Roberts ponders his mortality while celebrating the freedom of wild places. A book for anyone who appreciates good adventure writing.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60986-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
