An intense treat for armchair adventurers and renegade backpackers. Hopefully the publisher will include a map in the...
A seasoned wilderness survivalist takes on Alaska’s backcountry in his most daring trek to date.
From a young age growing up in Oregon, fish biologist Metz was fascinated by the call of the wild, where he would “feel light-headed and in perfect tune with my body and the world around me, like I belong in the wilderness.” Uniquely attracted to Alaska, the author claims more than a dozen trips there since he was 18, when he became “instantly hooked on the place.” At 30, he began meticulously mapping out a daring hike that would take three months to complete and cover 300 miles across the Brooks Range, an exceptionally remote, mountainous passage “that shifts dangers with the extreme change in seasons.” The area has only been traversed by a handful of hardcore explorers, so Metz planned to stay close to villages to replenish food supplies and then educated himself on the severe weather conditions as well as troubleshooting chance encounters with moose, wolves, bears and the “excruciating loneliness and hours of physical exertion.” Along with his two Airedale terriers, Jimmy and Will, the author left Oregon by plane in late March 2007 and headed for his Northwest coastal starting point of Kotzebue, Alaska, where previously mailed boxes of food and clothing awaited him in ten-degree weather. Metz delivers a spectacularly descriptive travelogue by way of chronological journal entries. With 200 pounds of cargo in tow, Metz travelled via dog-pulled skis, a method called “skijoring,” and he braved howling winds and numbing subzero temperatures, longed for girlfriend Julie and revisited bittersweet memories of his former canine traveling companion, Jonny. Depleting reserves of food and fatigue, as well as a tumble into an icy river, threatened his resolve, but the author’s ordeal remains a dazzling, grueling experience.
An intense treat for armchair adventurers and renegade backpackers. Hopefully the publisher will include a map in the finished book.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3139-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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