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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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