High-sighing story of the great high-wire artists, told by the granddaughter of legendary trapeze-artist Karl Wallenda and by journalist DeVincentis-Hayes (People, Redbook, etc.). Now that the Wallendas have dwindled down to a precious few, the remaining legally named Wallendas have wrangled with the author about her use of the Wallenda name in her high-wire act—for her mother was Wallenda's child by a woman he married after a Mexican divorce from his first wife, a divorce that the US failed to recognize. ``I walk the wire because it's in my blood,'' she says, and, with several thrilling moments, her story shows just how and why high-wire walking gets into your blood if you're a Wallenda. Leader of the pack was grandfather Karl, who insisted on topping himself with ever more dangerous acts. He seems to have been his own worst enemy, harboring one great dream: to skywalk Niagara Falls. But New York State doesn't allow high-wire acts without a net, so Karl invented the seven-man pyramid, in which six men form a pyramid with a woman sitting in a chair on top—an act so dangerous that no one else on earth dared do it. The Wallendas handled it safely for 16 years until, one day in Detroit, the strain overcame one member, leaving two dead and one paralyzed. But Karl survived and soon was back building the pyramid: Courage is all to the Wallendas. Fate caught up with him in Puerto Rico, however, when a poorly guyed wire and heavy winds toppled him from a skywalk between two tall buildings. The young author, meanwhile, had been taught by Karl and became the first woman skywalker, successfully walking the very wire that killed her grandfather. Circus lore—with suicides, bigamy, insanity and so on—fills in the family history. A strong, if downbeat, read. (Photographs) (First printing of 20,000)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-88282-116-4
Page Count: 267
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
