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 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
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