To be sure, some of Stafford’s mental baggage popped open during his latest crazy journey, but his chronicle is, on the...
Further tales from extreme adventurer Stafford (Walking the Amazon, 2011), European Adventurer of the Year in 2011.
The author’s latest is the stuff of nightmares: “No food, no equipment, no knife and not even any clothes.” Alone, on a remote island in the South Pacific. After his two-and-a-half-year ramble the length of the Amazon River, among traffickers, defensive locals and terrorists, what would be next? Greater duration was pointless, but as for in extremis, well, a couple months isolated on a South Pacific island, with absolutely no provisions—except for the video cameras that would record his days for the Discovery Channel—ought to do the trick. Stafford is a fit, adventure- and battle-tested, fairly normal and sociable man, so it came as little surprise that the isolation got to him. His story of those 60 days is raw and acrid, with all the pungency caught on tape clearly adding immediacy to the emotional wrench of the narrative. His physical travails were hardly negligible—the lack of fresh water drove his blood pressure through the roof (as did almost any stressful thing); “coconut tasted like whale blubber, snails like gritty balls of phlegm”; “I woke up to sharp stomach cramps and explosive diarrhea on the beach”—yet it was his mind that was pushed to the most painful places. He was edgy, frustrated, whiny and looking for someone to blame. Then came the little triumphs: building a fire, catching rainwater, finding a tin can, caramelizing coconut, hunting down a goat, and learning to focus and be serene in the face of those things he was not able to change. Ultimately, he notes why the island is uninhabited: “NO BLOODY FRESH WATER. For certain parts of the year the island produces less water than can sustain one male adult.”
To be sure, some of Stafford’s mental baggage popped open during his latest crazy journey, but his chronicle is, on the whole, entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218096-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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