Thrilling and wrenching.
Harrowing adventure near the summit of the second-tallest mountain in the world.
Located on the border between China and Pakistan, K2 is notoriously difficult to climb in “ordinary” conditions, with its steep summit approaches, deep crevasses and unpredictably violent weather. But as teams from the Netherlands, Serbia, the United States and Korea, among others, as well as their Sherpa guides, contended with K2’s idiosyncrasies on the first weekend of August 2008, they were unaware until too late that a giant serac, or glacier, above one of the steepest approaches was dangerously unstable. With dozens descending the peak in early evening under darkening skies, the crumbling serac sliced the rope leading back to safety, taking one climber with it as his wife and a friend watched helplessly. New York Times reporter Bowley confesses that he is no mountaineer, and it took him a while to warm up to the story when he was assigned it by the Times’s foreign desk. It was only when he got to meet some of the survivors and learned the background stories of those who lost their lives that he became enthralled. He traveled Europe and South Asia, interviewing climbers who were on the mountain and family members of the mountain’s victims, trying to piece together the complicated sequence of events that resulted in 11 deaths and numerous lost extremities. A Norwegian climber who witnessed the first stirrings of the ice-fall that led to the weekend’s worse carnage told the author, “[w]e think you are the one to tell our story.” The author’s remove from the events may put off fans of John Krakauer’s highly personal Into Thin Air (1997), but Bowley is an intrepid journalist and gifted storyteller. In a brisk epilogue, he tells of his own adventures interviewing the remarkable men and women involved in the tragedy and finding heroism and triumph despite unbearable suffering.
Thrilling and wrenching.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-183478-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
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
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