Mikkelsen is an artisan of cold places, and if his labors are mighty and consuming, they are also of love. (Photographs)
When it came to Polar exploration, writes Lawrence Millman in an introduction, the Scandinavians “make their British and American counterparts seem like Boy Scouts.”
The kind of character Millman had in mind was Mikkelsen (1880–1971), who chronicles here just one of his numerous exploits in the far, far north country. He’d gone to northeast Greenland in 1910 to recover the diary and any surviving papers that might document the 1908 Mylius-Erichsen Expedition’s attempts to refute Peary’s claim of having mapped the east Greenland coast. Mikkelsen’s account is a delight in misery, start to finish, though not of the heroic vein; it’s just that there’s little else to expect from such a land. The only thing eastern Greenland doesn’t have a dearth of is weather and wilds, both of which ring Mikkelsen and his companion Iver P. Iversen—“A stout fellow, Iversen!”—as if they were gongs. Food is the greatest privation when there’s nothing to eat but ice and rocks, the cold wind meanwhile ever present, but the two soldier on, gobbling the dogs when necessary, sampling rotten caches—“Isn’t mold a kind of vegetable?” Iversen asks—enduring scurvy and slush, and, without food or sleeping bags, “walking till we could no longer set one foot before another, then [sinking] down behind a stone until the cold woke us, and then [walking] on again.” But it was worth it, for they found the diaries that disproved Peary’s work—and a gratifying poke in Peary’s eye that is for Mikkelsen. And at least Mikkelsen was where he wanted to be, a land always willing to drop “a little gall in our cup,” yet also an elemental place of rare beauty that demands attentiveness and perhaps even becomes vitally sustaining as it tries to kill you.
Mikkelsen is an artisan of cold places, and if his labors are mighty and consuming, they are also of love. (Photographs)Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-58642-057-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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