An inspiringly intense memoir for readers of adventure lit.
A much-honored climber’s exciting story of the death-defying feats that led to rock-climbing superstardom.
Honnold showed a predilection for climbing when he was still a small child. At age 5, he managed to scramble 30 feet off the ground at a climbing gym within just a few minutes. Later, he entered climbing competitions all over his home state of California. After his father died, Honnold dropped out of college and chose to live out of his mother’s minivan while climbing mountains. This book—which alternates between narratives by Honnold and writer/climber Roberts (Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest, 2015, etc.)—focuses on that remarkable and unconventional life and how Honnold, a quiet man who climbed purely for the joy of adventure, became “the most famous climber in the world” in the span of seven years. In his early days as a vagabond climber, he learned how to free solo, a form of climbing that relies on strength and skill alone. Not long after that, Honnold began attempting climbs—such as Half Dome in Yosemite and Sendero Luminoso in Mexico—that veterans of the sport believed were too difficult to do without gear or a partner. His notoriety spread quickly among rock climbers. Rapidly, Honnold became the subject of several documentaries and was receiving sponsorships that allowed him to travel the world and push the boundaries of his sport to extreme new heights. His dedication to the sport of rock climbing had its costs, however, including the painful end of a long-term relationship. Yet celebrity status also reinforced his belief in the importance of living simply. In 2012, he established the Honnold Foundation, which sought “sustainable ways to improve lives worldwide.” The humility, pioneering spirit, and courage that are the author’s personal hallmarks are both refreshing and invigorating. His account ultimately reminds readers how genuine fulfillment comes only when engaging in life fully and without fear.
An inspiringly intense memoir for readers of adventure lit.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24762-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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