Thrilling and wrenching.
Harrowing adventure near the summit of the second-tallest mountain in the world.
Located on the border between China and Pakistan, K2 is notoriously difficult to climb in “ordinary” conditions, with its steep summit approaches, deep crevasses and unpredictably violent weather. But as teams from the Netherlands, Serbia, the United States and Korea, among others, as well as their Sherpa guides, contended with K2’s idiosyncrasies on the first weekend of August 2008, they were unaware until too late that a giant serac, or glacier, above one of the steepest approaches was dangerously unstable. With dozens descending the peak in early evening under darkening skies, the crumbling serac sliced the rope leading back to safety, taking one climber with it as his wife and a friend watched helplessly. New York Times reporter Bowley confesses that he is no mountaineer, and it took him a while to warm up to the story when he was assigned it by the Times’s foreign desk. It was only when he got to meet some of the survivors and learned the background stories of those who lost their lives that he became enthralled. He traveled Europe and South Asia, interviewing climbers who were on the mountain and family members of the mountain’s victims, trying to piece together the complicated sequence of events that resulted in 11 deaths and numerous lost extremities. A Norwegian climber who witnessed the first stirrings of the ice-fall that led to the weekend’s worse carnage told the author, “[w]e think you are the one to tell our story.” The author’s remove from the events may put off fans of John Krakauer’s highly personal Into Thin Air (1997), but Bowley is an intrepid journalist and gifted storyteller. In a brisk epilogue, he tells of his own adventures interviewing the remarkable men and women involved in the tragedy and finding heroism and triumph despite unbearable suffering.
Thrilling and wrenching.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-183478-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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