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
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
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
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