Charming and surprisingly quirky, providing the perfect escapist fantasy for couch potatoes and weekend warriors alike.
Extreme-endurance athlete Karnazes chronicles his running career.
It didn’t begin auspiciously. After a single high-school season on the cross-country team, he quit and didn’t run again until his 30th birthday. That night, after a drink at the bar, he ran 30 miles from San Francisco to Half Moon Bay—a mere sprint compared to the distances he’s covered since then. Karnazes has engaged in athletic contests that test the limits of human endurance: 100-mile runs, back-to-back marathons, treks across Death Valley, and one memorable marathon across the snows of Antarctica. (His competitors used snowshoes; he wore sneakers.) With plain talk and plenty of inspirational quotes, Karnazes tells readers just what it’s like to run 20 miles up a mountain side and know that 80 miles remain, how leg muscles feel when cramp strikes, and where the mind wanders when the body is punished so severely. Reading his account of his first 100-Mile Endurance Run, the reader winces as his blisters are lanced, then plugged with Super Glue, and cringes when he takes a wrong turn that adds distance to an already impossibly long trail. Karnazes does a lot of thinking about the reasons he took up such a demanding hobby. He can’t say exactly why, though he surmises that it may be linked to the death of his beloved 18-year-old sister Pary in a car accident. He also points to the comfort of having clearly defined goals (races are conceptually simple affairs) and wonders whether he might have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Whatever his reasons, Karnazes has made a life for himself in which he runs thousands of miles a year, sleeps only four hours a night, holds down a day job in business, and almost never misses his son’s ballgames.
Charming and surprisingly quirky, providing the perfect escapist fantasy for couch potatoes and weekend warriors alike.Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 1-58542-278-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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