Record-breaking long-distance swimmer Cox (Grayson, 2008, etc.) retraces Norwegian explorer’s Roald Amundsen's groundbreaking polar explorations.
Part personal memoir and part a recounting of earlier voyages of discovery, the book's release is timed to coincide with the centenary of the famous 1911 race to the South Pole when Amundsen beat the British standard-bearer Robert Scott's ill-fated party by less than a month. The author, who tested her endurance by swimming in subzero temperatures, reports her fascination with the pioneering efforts of Amundsen and his Norwegian predecessors. She sees a parallel between her own preparations to swim in extremely cold waters and their similar efforts to prepare to endure glacial conditions. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, a mentor to Amundsen, hoped to find the Northwest passage. He and his crew trained in Greenland, where they studied the survival skills of the local Inuit population. Though he failed, Amundsen followed in his footsteps and succeeded, and he intended to return to the Arctic but was thwarted by the beginning of World War I. After the war, he became involved with exploratory air flights to the North and South Poles. Cox writes about how she attempted to follow in their footsteps—swimming in Greenland's freezing waters—in order to explore “the inner and outer worlds of what a human being could achieve.” She weaves together her own experiences, including a flight to the South Pole, with those of the earlier explorers, and relates interesting anecdotes about the people who helped her on her quest. Entertaining, but readers may wish for more Amundsen and less Cox.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59340-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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