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
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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