The depth of feeling here and the writers’ hard-earned experience elevate this volume above many other books in the popular...
The world’s most widely known high-altitude mountaineer reflects on his Everest career.
If you had to pick only one advantage for this fourth memoir from Viesturs (The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna—the World's Deadliest Peak, 2011, etc.), it’s that the man knows the territory intimately. These in-depth stories about and reflections on Everest by the author—who was first to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-plus–meter peaks (by happy accident, by his own admission)—are bolstered by world-class assists from acclaimed adventure writer Roberts (Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration, 2013, etc.). Viesturs wisely shies away from Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air territory (“Is there anything new to say about the disaster on Mount Everest in the spring of 1996? I doubt it”). Instead, the author intertwines the still-gripping stories of his summits between 1987 and 2009 with a critical eye on other legendary exploits, from the great mystery of the 1924 expedition to unique challenges presented by certain routes to unexplained hoaxes through the years. In the process, Viesturs unearths some interesting tidbits that may be well-known to his community but new to laymen. The author, who has been lauded for his compassion and assistance to other climbers, also brings an unexpected attribute: attitude. One question that continually surfaces is whether he believes George Mallory and Andrew Irvine made it to the summit before their deaths in 1924, and Viesturs is brutally candid. “My answer is this: It doesn’t matter whether Mallory and Irvine got to the summit. It’s irrelevant. They didn’t make it back down.” This is followed by the even terser admonishment: “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting back down is mandatory.”
The depth of feeling here and the writers’ hard-earned experience elevate this volume above many other books in the popular “snow and ice” genre.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9473-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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