An inspiring yet relatable true story with exciting scenes and plenty of heart.
A memoir that chronicles a former businesswoman’s quest to scale the highest of New Hampshire’s mountains.
Suchors (co-author: Own Your Own Cable System, 1983) graduated from Harvard Business School in the late 1970s and moved up the corporate ladder before marrying, launching a successful consulting business, and starting a family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She grew up with alcoholic parents and a beloved but challenging older sister with Down syndrome; she also felt pressure to excel at all costs, without ever asking for help. When she was still reeling from her mother’s death, she met her neighbor Kate, a fellow wife, mother, and feminist, and the two formed a close bond. Both novice hikers, they learned of the Four Thousand Footer Club, an elite society consisting of members who’d scaled the 48 mountains in New Hampshire over 4,000 feet high. The two women made this achievement their goal and grew closer as they pursued intense training regimens that included climbing up and down stairways at a local public-transit station, learning how to pack hiking necessities while avoiding extra weight, and relying heavily on the Appalachian Mountain Club’s White Mountain Guide, which they referred to as their “bible.” Over the years, several other women became involved in the quest to varying degrees: Suchors’ personal trainer Cathy, her college friend Sarah, and Ginny, a choral master. After tragedy struck, the author was more determined than ever to climb the 48. Suchors’ journey feels authentic, and her writing, gleaned from journals she kept over the years, brings to vivid life a proud and driven woman, her staunch support network, and her vibrant, intelligent best friend and soul mate. She evocatively explains how every early alarm clock, hiking-boot print, and summit happy dance makes her think of her relationship with her friend. Throughout, her prose radiates a sense of determination: “Mt. Tripyramid would push me to my limits.…No matter. Though I might be a month shy of forty-eight and potentially a fool for giving up a lucrative business career to write a novel, I would complete this ‘event.’ ”
An inspiring yet relatable true story with exciting scenes and plenty of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-473-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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