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DOWNCANYON

Name: DOWNCANYON
Author: Ann Haymond Zwinger
ISBN: 0-8165-1163-2

A NATURALIST EXPLORES THE COLORADO RIVER THROUGH GRAND CANYON

by Ann Haymond Zwinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1995

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In a book dense with scientific and historical observations, in which seemingly nothing about the region's flora, fauna, and geology has escaped her notice, Zwinger fashions a joltingly beautiful study of the canyon and its river. The pleasures in reading this book are manifold. Zwinger's (The Mysterious Land, 1989, etc.) quietly heroic accounts of rafting the canyon's 60 rapids are thrilling by themselves, but one also reads of her 19th and early 20th century predecessors' adventuressome fatalon this same water and the types of craft used to navigate the river. Zwinger discusses the pottery, tools, and settlement patterns of the earliest human inhabitants as she floats by or hikes to the many Anasazi sites within the canyon walls. She endures sweltering and bone-chilling days and nights, taking part in eagle counting or tracking of the hump-back chub, now threatened by the changes wrought by the Glen Canyon Dam upstream. Perhaps her most beautiful writing can be found in the minutely detailed descriptions of the insect and reptile life she closely observes, although as occurs around the bends of the river, surprises turn up everywhere in these pages. Zwinger paints vibrant prose pictures of the multicolored canyon walls, expressing a sincere sense of awe at the ancient geologic processes that created and laid down the limestone, sandstone, and basalt flows through which the river cut to reach its present level. On being asked by a tourist, after she hikes up to the canyon rim, whether there is anything ``down there'' to see, Zwinger reflects that `` `down there' encompasses contrasts between minute midge and pounding waterfall, between eternity in an ebony schist and the moment in the pulsing vein in a dragonfly's wing, a delicate shard lost in an immensity of landscape.'' This extraordinary book places Zwinger squarely among the best of today's nature writers.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-8165-1163-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Univ. of Arizona

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)