A memoir of mountaineering and life by a Canadian alpinist.
In 1972, 14-year-old Redford moved from the Yukon to Ontario with her family. It wasn’t a happy time, she writes, with an overworked mother and a father who retreated into a bottle; she sublimated by climbing such heights as she could find to “blow off some of this fuck you! anger.” The confused teenager morphed into an adult with a yen for fellow climbing fools who live dangerously and sometimes pay the price. A tragedy, major or minor, comes along every couple of dozen pages, peppered with plenty of near misses (“I’d chopped my rope and I’d almost killed my friend”) that, in the way of mountaineers, get shrugged off (“I’m still here, aren’t I?”). The author’s firsthand look into the mores of the climbing tribe is occasionally overheated but seldom digs deep; it’s a matter of cold beers, righteous peaks, and free-wheeling clichés (“I’d never get sucked into a middle-class existence again…it was a thinly disguised form of enslavement”). Her reckoning with the conflicting demands of marriage and motherhood is often superficial: “If the boys came back with the second ascent of the Rupal Face and, on top of that, Everest, they’d be heroes. I’d be just another woman who’d popped out a baby.” However, Redford hits true-sounding notes when she contemplates how mountaineering women who had scaled Everest and other big peaks and then had children and retired from the sport were at least alive to tell the tale. Better, and worth the price of admission, are Redford’s up-close encounters with the rock itself: “Ropey tendons popped up on the backs of my hands, white with chalk as I clamped down on each hold like a vise. There was no noise in my head, no voices telling me what I could or could not do.”
Fails to scale the literary heights of Arlene Blum’s Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (1982) in the canon of women’s mountaineering books but still worthy for aspiring climbersPub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-030-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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