Action-filled yet thoughtful, with primary appeal for serious mountaineering students, and selling potential within the...
An unusual memoir-cum-spiritual-meditation attempts to locate (both literally and figuratively) the English mountaineer George Mallory, who disappeared on Mount Everest in 1924.
Messner (The Crystal Horizon, not reviewed) was the first individual to climb Everest without oxygen, and the first to climb all 14 of the world’s tallest (over 8,000 meters) mountains. He sees in the gentlemanly and idealistic Mallory the standard-bearer for a bygone age of “amateur” mountaineering, and he recreates the narrative of Mallory’s several Everest expeditions through an unusual merger of Mallory’s journals, writings, and imaginary reactions to the ongoing Everest drama. This tactic proves less unwieldy than it sounds, due to Messner’s clean narrative line, and it adds verisimilitude to the detailed accounts of the expeditions, which feel both historicized and hair-raising; the reader certainly absorbs the seat-of-the-pants, chipper yet dangerous spirit of these early mountaineering efforts. The author clarifies the important role Mallory and his peers played in normalizing the pursuit, despite long-thorny relations between individual cliques of climbers, and between Britain, Tibet, and China. Mallory and an associate died on the notorious 1924 expedition; both his survivors and Messner were struck by the juxtaposition of Mallory’s grace and skill and the seeming inevitability of his demise. The author also provides an arch account of the progress of Everest’s commercialization, stoked by rivalry between British and Chinese expedition teams, which led to the installation of ropes and aluminum ladders across the mountain's precarious ascents, and then to the contemporary congestion of “tour operators and professional guides, more concerned with profit than with safety, [who] turned a spiritual quest into a cold-blooded accomplishment.” He concludes with the 1999 discovery and burial of Mallory’s body, asserting that although the master likely failed to reach the summit, Mallory remains the spiritual father of high-altitude mountaineering.
Action-filled yet thoughtful, with primary appeal for serious mountaineering students, and selling potential within the “extreme sports” demographic.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26806-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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