In the true spirit of a participant/observer's way to knowledge, sports journalist Dugard tackles the vigorously insane sport of adventure racing. Any way you slice it, the Raid Gauloises is an extreme sport. Usually about a week long, the event requires teams of five (each with at least one woman, and all team members must finish) to get from point A to point B by a variety of hellacious means: sea kayaking among sharks, parachuting into remote forest clearings, full-spate whitewater rafting, claustrophobic spelunking, cruel marches, ice climbing. All this—plus an entire zoology text's litany of evil creatures, from vicious microbes to disturbed crocodiles, since the Raid is held in venues like Madagascar and Borneo—for a pitiful $35,000 prize. Dugard covered a few of the early Raids (they began in 1989) as a journalist under the same appalling conditions endured by the contestants—rain, cold, heat, mud, leeches, etc.—but experienced a lot more boredom. An endurance runner and triathlete, Dugard found it hard to just stand there, so he formed his own team for the 1995 Patagonian Raid. Dugard's story here gets bogged down in logistics, losing the elasticity of his sports reporting, and when he drops out due to a knee injury, he endlessly flails himself with self-recrimination, and the story grinds to a halt. Fortunately for Dugard and his readers alike, he is more successful in the 1997 Lesotho Raid, in which he is allowed to race independently, waiting a chance to join a team when a member drops out. The narrative regains its bounce as he details his misery, his adopted team's dynamics, and the exultation of finishing. ``Each moment of each day is lived with incredible intensity,'' notes Dugard: intense pain and fear, yes, and intense dehydration, hunger, disorientation, personal filth. Not everyone will feel the Raid's calling. (16 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-07-018129-2
Page Count: 175
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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