A fascinating look at the adventures of remarkably resilient men, so well-related as to make you feel the chill.
Pulitzer Prize winner Larson (History and Law/Pepperdine Univ.; The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, 2014, etc.) records the three most important expeditions during a highly significant year in polar exploration.
The Gilded Age was a time of great wealth, and men and women wanted to prove they were more than just society figures sipping champagne. Primary among these was the most famous climber at the time, Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, the Duke of the Abruzzi, who held the farthest-north record at the Arctic and first ascent on mountains on three continents. In 1909, he turned to the “Pole of Altitude” in the Himalayas, “one of the world’s highest mountains.” Mount Everest was out of the question, since Nepal and Tibet had closed their borders, but this would prove an equally difficult challenge. Focusing on the North Pole was American Robert E. Peary, who had mounted seven prior expeditions and had the lost toes to prove it. He had experienced many setbacks—e.g., trying to traverse sea ice that could carry away supplies, disrupt trails, and disorient returning groups. Peary was obsessed with gaining the pole and glory and downplayed scientific records and research while they wintered over. He also plundered the north and the Inuit Nation of religious objects, furs, and tusks. Ernest Shackleton relied on ponies and a fairly useless motor car to transport supplies in the Antarctic. His group included the best of scientific experts, split so one group, led by Edgeworth David, headed for the magnetic pole, which is not fixed but migrates with the Earth’s fluid core, and the other, led by Shackleton, for the geographic pole. Throughout, Larson delivers riveting tales of stalwart explorers risking their lives for discovery in some of the world’s harshest areas. Their successes and even their failures made them heroes.
A fascinating look at the adventures of remarkably resilient men, so well-related as to make you feel the chill.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-256447-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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