Icy adventure, dramatically recounted, about wintering over in a 36-foot sailboat frozen into place north of the Arctic Circle. It may or may not be coincidence that the most popular explorer/adventure books in recent years have taken place at high altitude (Everest) or low latitude (Alaska). A long-time adventure sailor, Simon is a veteran of expeditions in the Southern Hemisphere, including treks into Borneo. But it was the romance of the Arctic that called him for what was to be his and his wife Diana’s last major exploration. It took them nearly two years to prepare, including finding the 36-foot steel boat that was to be their home and anchoring for a winter in Maine to practice cold-weather survival. Come spring, they set out for Baffin Bay in search of a cove sufficiently protected to keep their mission from being suicidal, and sufficiently remote to satisfy Alvah’s hunger for quest. They barely made safe harbor before the ice began to close in. Soon after, Diana was flown out to New Zealand to be with her terminally ill father. With emergency service shut down for the winter and 24 hours of darkness setting in, Alvah was isolated with their cat, Halifax. His months alone evolved into a spiritual search that changed his life. He also endured extraordinary mechanical challenges that included temporary blindness from carbon monoxide. So transformed was he by his months alone in darkness and cold that when Diana finally returned, he was slow to accept her presence. Besides his soul-searching, there are also evocative observations of Arctic flora and fauna, including a literally death- defying but liberating encounter with “Nanook,” the gigantic polar bear of the Arctic. A platform on behalf of preserving the Arctic ecology and its Inuit culture, but no pretense regarding scientific or cultural research here. Simon launched this adventure for his own satisfaction, and he achieved that, perhaps on behalf of us all.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-07-058052-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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