An aging former Catholic seminarian, ex-Marine and businessman, debut author Villareal recounts solo climbing the high Andes.
The author has navigated Andean superpeaks again and again to discover anew the extreme challenges of high-altitude climbing alone in the deserted mountain vastness of the Andes. Possessed of an indefatigable positivity, Villareal details many of his middle-age journeys in this book written for his young grandson, Alex, so that the young boy will come to understand his grandfather’s unique life and his decision to leave the pleasures of home behind and engage in the rigors of high-altitude mountaineering. He carefully plans and executes these risky mountain assaults knowing that one misstep may lead to his death. Villareal repeatedly reflects on his reasons for choosing this path not taken by most others. “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains,” Villareal writes, “Yet they pass their daily lives without wondering in the least about themselves.” He hungers to fulfill his individual destiny, but he has a hard time explaining the motives that push him to continue these terrifying ascents well into his 60s. His fascination for mountains remains an enigma, the author says repeatedly. “It reminds me of Moby Dick,” he says, “And I pray it doesn’t drag me under as the whale did Ahab.” Told in straightforward first-person prose, the book sometimes delivers exceptional descriptive passages that capture mountain moments, such as the alpine glow as it fades from the Andean summits: “A crooked shaft of flaming fire breaks the black of the distant horizon and illuminates the sky with glittering flame.” Some small grammar issues can detract from the relentless forward press to portray the privations and challenges of solo climbing at high altitudes. Linked to the author’s website, which features many of his pictures from his various journeys, the book stands on its own as a tribute to the author’s life of solitary adventure and individual courage.
An often riveting account that details the interior life of the solo mountaineer as well as his adventures scaling some of the highest and most treacherous peaks in the world.
Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1458213228
Page Count: 308
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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