A real squirmer—outrageous white-knuckle horror—and you can only imagine: better him than you.
A difficult and dangerous climb in the Alaska Range turns grotesque beyond measure when mountaineer Fletcher becomes the object of a grizzly bear's undying wrath.
As Englishman Fletcher tells it, he's a bit of a hard case in the climbing world, the kind of fellow who likes to go it alone, unsupported and without previous reconnaissance, without weapons, though he had been warned of the rough-customer grizzlies of his chosen venue, Mt. Hess, a peak rarely visited. “I was balancing off the weight of a rifle and ammunition against the unlikely event of meeting a bear.” Think again. Not only does he meet a bear, he kills it in a moment of terror and confusion. It turns out to be a cub, and Fletcher is appalled by what he has done—but he will pay for it, with interest. Another bear soon materializes: “It has to be the one whose cub I killed. I can tell by the hatred written all over it. . . . I can clearly see that the bear has every intention of tearing me to pieces.” From there on out, the writing stays atwitter as Fletcher recounts his flight from the bear—he manages to scale Mt. Hess in the process—and the absurd, almost comical number of encounters they have. At one point, the bear has a claw hooked into his boot as Fletcher dangles from a rope attached to a frozen waterfall, when a large section of the ice collapses on the beast. But it rises, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, time and again. Fletcher overdraws the final moments—the seconds really do draw into hours, but they are so fraught, readers will hang in there with him. Trapped in a crevasse, the bear's claws raking his jacket, Fletcher sets the bear alight, leading to a final showdown.
A real squirmer—outrageous white-knuckle horror—and you can only imagine: better him than you.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0998-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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