By all rights, this should be the stuff of epic, but many readers are likely to be left cold.
Disappointing account of the first two-woman expedition across Antarctica, as told by the participants.
Former schoolteachers Bancroft and Arnesen both had extensive outdoor experience, including previous Antarctic trips, before they teamed up for their joint adventure. As quickly becomes clear, Antarctic exploration is no game for dilettantes or amateurs. When she recruited Arnesen, a Norwegian who had skied alone to the South Pole and across Greenland, Bancroft had already put together a team to line up corporate sponsorship and to negotiate the various governmental and other hurdles any would-be visitor to the southernmost continent must deal with. The expedition’s troubles began when the airline contracted to fly the two women to their starting point raised its price; ultimately, they arrived some two weeks late. Once on the ice, they faced a string of hardships and near-disasters. Bancroft injured a shoulder attempting to handle the sails they used to pull themselves and their sleds over the ice. An emergency signal went out without their knowledge, almost resulting in a rescue plane being sent. At the same time, they traveled with satellite phones, laptop computers, and the latest high-tech cold-weather gear (listed by brand name in an appendix). In the end, hard work and sheer stubbornness got them across the continent in a journey they saw as an inspiration for women and for the disadvantaged everywhere, even though they fell short of the coastline. Alternating their accounts with summaries by Dahle, the explorers do their best to conjure up their experience for stay-at-home readers. Unfortunately, the few moments of drama seem insufficient payoff for their ordeal.
By all rights, this should be the stuff of epic, but many readers are likely to be left cold.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7382-0794-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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
SEEN & HEARD
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