Simple, appealing account of a woman's solo ski trek to the magnetic North Pole. Thayer's goal isn't the imaginary dot at the top of the globe that bedeviled Peary and Cook but, rather, the spot to which all compasses point, some 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Nonetheless, this is a formidable journey filled with dangers, including horrendous cold (wind chills of -100 F.), dangerous ice, polar bears, and exhaustion. What's more, no woman has ever done this before, and Thayer is 50 years old when she sets out. After 27 grueling days towing a 160-pound sled, she makes it. One reason is her fortitude; the other is a black husky named Charlie (``there was something about him I thought I could trust and I decided to take him with me,'' she writes in her unadorned manner). Charlie squirrels his way into Thayer's affections for good reason, since many times he saves her from polar bears on the attack. Thayer's encounters with these white-furred killing machines are terrifying. Once, she walks toward what looks like a cute cub only to find that it's a voracious adult; another time, Charlie's heroics involve locking his jaws on a bear's leg. Thayer never minces her fear (``the pit of my stomach was an ice-cube, even my knees were shaking''), and, at one point, she breaks down and sobs, but her eyelids freeze tight: ``There could be no more crying on this expedition.'' She endures storms, fog, starvation, thirst, and a desperate flight over cracking ice. Today, Charlie is snug on the homestead in Washington State, and Thayer is planning an expedition—with her husband—to the North Pole itself. Enough feminine overtones (tears, worry about eyelashes, plus the voice of a middle-aged woman) to make a solid, no-frills adventure for women as well as men. (Eight pages of color photographs—not seen.) (First serial rights to Cosmopolitan)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79386-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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