An emotion- and action-packed story of the author’s tenacious, dogged pursuit of his goals.
The story of one man's ability to rise above his physical disability to achieve his dreams.
When Paddock was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, cutting off vital oxygen to his brain, leaving him with a strange gait and uncoordinated limbs. However, the author didn't let his extreme clumsiness slow him down, as he was determined to keep up with his two older brothers, despite the numerous broken bones he received while trying. Even after being diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 11, Paddock continued to push himself physically, a trait that continued into adulthood. After running a half-marathon to raise money and awareness for cerebral palsy, the author’s life changed radically, and he became determined to show the world that people with this condition could do as much or more than anyone else. With a couple of marathons under his belt, Paddock tackled Mount Kilimanjaro, which became as much a battle with his inner emotions as with the mountain itself. The author’s prose, aided by Bascomb (The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World's Most Notorious Nazi, 2013, etc.), places readers on the mountainside with him, enduring the endless cold, wind and altitude sickness as he pushed himself to reach the summit. "Somewhere—the hundredth switchback, the thousandth—the pain in my legs blew past anything I had ever known,” writes the author. “With each step my feet and ankles sent shockwaves of agony. I wanted to cry, to sit down on a rock and weep, but that would mean giving in to the pain.” But Paddock went even further and entered the Kona Triathlon, one of the hardest physical endurance races in existence. His story of training for these events and the mind-boggling pain he endured to achieve his goals will have readers crying and cheering all the way to the finish line.
An emotion- and action-packed story of the author’s tenacious, dogged pursuit of his goals.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229558-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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