A motivational tale of a woman who overcame her biggest critics, including her inner self, to achieve one dream after...
Inspirational memoir from the oldest woman to climb El Capitan.
As Wolownick (English for (Foreign) Language Students, 2013, etc.) recounts, her mother was incapacitated by childhood polio, so when the author was old enough, she became her mother’s arms and legs, doing errands and chores at age 5. Her father told her she’d never be his equal. Later, Wolownick married an emotionally abusive man and spent years in a relationship that sparked no love or joy, staying only because she felt duty-bound to her children to provide a solid home life. Her son, Alex Honnold, began climbing as an infant and never stopped, eventually becoming a legendary free climber. Her daughter is a marathoner. Both children inspired the author to push herself to perform in both sports, and she began training in her mid-50s. In this melancholic and reflective book, Wolownick shares the lows of her childhood and her marriage, voicing the doubts and fears she had and the lack of companionship or love she felt. She intertwines these moments with the highs of her life—e.g., finding the strength and energy to run her first marathon, followed by others, and then to begin climbing with Alex by her side. In both sports, she found new friendships, created deeper bonds with her children, and, most importantly, rediscovered her own self-worth and capacity to persevere through the most difficult circumstances. The author proves that age is just a number and that determination and grit can take a person to unexpected heights. For her, that meant conquering El Capitan at the age of 66. Wolownick’s story of her drive to push her physical body beyond her mental limits will serve as a stimulant for those yearning to do more with their lives.
A motivational tale of a woman who overcame her biggest critics, including her inner self, to achieve one dream after another.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68051-242-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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