A lighthearted book to appeal to fellow swimmers.
Having conquered land as a serial marathoner, the author turns her athletic attentions toward the sea.
In Running Like a Girl (2013), Elle UK books editor Heminsley detailed her physical transformation: “Within five years I had gone from someone for whom any sort of exercise was theoretical—a nice idea, but something for others, for the ‘sporty types’—to someone who had run five marathons”—and someone whose example had encouraged others. At the very least, armchair exercise, like armchair travel, has its own bookish appeal. Seeking another challenge, Heminsley decided on open-water swimming. A little too neatly, she chronicles how her new adventure began on the day she was to “leap in” to marriage, and the immediate aftermath was so calamitous it made her more determined: her betrothed lost his wedding ring to the waves, and flooding filled their flat. She saw the sea as “the enemy. Thief of rings, wrecker of homes, menace to married life….It was the sea versus me, and I would throw everything at this fight, so determined was I not to be the loser.” The fight would involve swimming lessons, pools, rivers, and ultimately competition in the open waters. The author would discover that swimming presented a different set of challenges, perspectives, and techniques to master than running had and that some of what she had developed as a runner would work against her in the water. While she was becoming more adept at swimming in the open water, she and her husband were trying to conceive, so there are plenty of parallels on the body’s potential and one’s mastery over it—and plenty of inspirational exhortations—e.g., “I breathe, I push, I pull. I am.” Yet details of her swimming progress can only engage for so long, and the author devotes the last third of the book to swimming miscellany: the history of swimming, how to learn, what sort of suit and equipment to buy, other books to read, etc.
A lighthearted book to appeal to fellow swimmers.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-433-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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