A wonderful tribute to the greatness of the human spirit.
The first blind man to climb Mount Everest narrates his kayaking descent of 300 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
On one level, this is a tale of grit, determination, courage, and overcoming tremendous odds. With co-author Levy, Weihenmayer (The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles Into Greatness, 2007, etc.) presents an exhilarating adventure story of arduous mountain climbing and whitewater kayaking, but he also offers broader life lessons. Over the course of eight years, the author organized his kayaking team as a byproduct of helping others, including blind orphans in Tibet and Nepal, blind teenagers in America, and veterans of our recent wars recovering from physical and mental wounds. Among them was Kyle, an amputee who pledged to scatter a fallen comrade’s ashes from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and a shy blind kid named Joey, who had never peeled an orange. Weihenmayer’s organization No Barriers is intended to address those in need in many different ways. For one, the author works intensively with youth. “For blind kids to succeed,” he writes, “they don’t just need other blind people. They’ll need to work with seeing people to harness those abilities and learn to thrive in the sighted world.” Weihenmayer elaborates on the skills required to achieve significant goals, including finding the right people, technologies, and methods necessary to accomplish these goals. It took a team of 10 to help the author make his descent down the Colorado, and the stories of the team members, some of whom had been with the author through many adventures, add to the narrative. Together, they developed a plan of attack for each of the rapids and unique communication and power supply methods, and they were backed by a logistics operation moving tons of equipment. Ultimately, in this highly inspirational tale, the Grand Canyon, like Everest and other summits, becomes a metaphor for life: “physical, mental, and psychological and…never ending.”
A wonderful tribute to the greatness of the human spirit.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08878-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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