Empowering and suitably commemorative.
A world-record–holding professional triathlete enthusiastically shares a life devoted to sports, her “drug of choice.”
Early on in her amiable memoir, Wellington admits to being “accident-prone and low on common sense.” That fact hardly prevented her from pursuing a career in the high-octane arena of competitive sports. Enjoying a happy childhood in eastern England, Wellington was raised by parents who, while they loved the outdoors, displayed none of the athletic prowess she’d nurtured throughout her adolescence, a time plagued with anorexia, bulimia and alcohol binging. Her burgeoning interest in corporate law took a backseat to environmental-development work and concurrent marathon runs, which served to fuel an interest in triathlon training in Nepal and assorted adventures honing her craft in Switzerland. She began training with noted Australian coach Brett Sutton and continued onward to triathlon competitions worldwide. Wellington traces her personal history through memories and diary entries. But most compelling are the urgent details on the meticulous preparatory routines and rituals necessary to become physically (and mentally) ready to compete in these grueling contests. Later candid chapters on her morphing relationship with Sutton, revelations on life and love and her record-setting racing record effectively gel to illustrate the strife and struggle as well as the victorious exhilaration inherent with training, competing in and winning the Kona Ironman Triathlon. She concludes with comments on the completion of her 13th Ironman race in 2011.
Empowering and suitably commemorative.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0557-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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