Arnold has crafted a fierce book for those who know the game—and for the rest of us, who can vicariously push through our...
This debut story collection is a gutsy, up-close look at mountain climbing around the world.
Arnold is an outdoor writer whose nonfiction work focuses on climbing (From Salt to Summit, 2012, etc.). He's an active climber himself, and this book rings true, examining the lives of those who are lured to the mountains. Subcultures always have their own languages, and Arnold has his down: “The angle ratchets out toward vertical. Ann pounds a half-hitch piton to the eye…threads a bight through her handle-modified GriGri, and clips the end to the piton.” That writing typifies the rhythm and rich language that drive all the stories in this collection. “The Cleaning Crew” is a somber look at a climber losing his partner during an unimaginable storm on the rock. He tells the tale to find relief but receives no sympathy from the other climbers at a hostel in Argentina. “No Place for Vagabonds” feels like an epic travelogue told by a guerrilla climber who's asked to join a major, industrialized expedition to K2. Chase Vox describes the group, awestruck and repulsed: “We were a small country. The rich and powerful doing bizarre stuff at the top while the workers labored at the bottom.” But there's a twist—a hippy named Wind who shadows the expedition and sets Chase’s mountain ethic on its ear as he accomplishes what no one else can. “Cowards Run” is outdoor writing at its best, delivered in a tale of two 17-year-old boys living an impossible summer; it starts with the storms of the sea and ends atop Mount Fairweather. In this book, the top is the point.
Arnold has crafted a fierce book for those who know the game—and for the rest of us, who can vicariously push through our fears of the wild.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-453-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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