A worthy addition to the canon of extreme-survival nonfiction.
White-knuckle account of a terrifying 1984 plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and its improbable reverberations in the lives of four survivors.
National Magazine Award–winning journalist Shaben’s debut has at its center a stranger-than-fiction, cinematic sequence: the injured survivors—the pilot, a politician, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and his prisoner, a fugitive drifter—hanging on to life together overnight in subzero temperatures. The politician, Larry Shaben, Canada’s first Muslim Cabinet minister, was the author’s father. Fortunately, this personal connection only amplifies Shaben’s determination to reconstruct the incident and its aftermath from all four survivors’ perspectives. She places the crash in the context of the shaky standards of the commuter air industry. Her meticulous account first focuses on the survivors’ back stories: She portrays the pilot as well-meaning but guilty of error under pressure (including flying into bad weather with no co-pilot and incomplete instrumentation). The most compelling character arc is that of the drifter, who rescued his captor from the wreckage and was instrumental in keeping the others alive. He was hailed as a hero, yet his life continued on a dark downward spiral, while the cop he saved left the force for a spiritual quest. On top of all this, Shaben also follows the formidable rescue effort quickly mounted by the hardy rural Canadians. Though the book’s propulsive pace slackens in the final sections, dealing with the crash’s aftermath—blame was showered on both the airline’s corner-cutting and on the luckless young pilot, who was frank about his errors and faced a long redemption—this is a complex, chilling narrative rendered with depth and precision, engaged in both its characters and the larger social moment (the crash led to recommendations for commuter air reform, not always followed in the years since).
A worthy addition to the canon of extreme-survival nonfiction.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0195-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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