A quirky, captivating biography.
An energetic work that chases the legend and captures the life story of premier Canadian extreme-distance runner Al Howie.
In an eccentric sport, Howie stood out. He would run hundreds or thousands of miles cross-country to the starting lines of multiday races—and then run to the next. Like a tour guide, Beasley (The Black Sheep, 2016) explores the cloistered world of extreme-distance running—involving races longer than standard 26.2-mile marathons—where Howie became an icon but never a household name. In 2014, the author found Howie, a silent shell of his former self, at a group home for the mentally ill. During the runner’s final two years, Beasley teased out recollections while tracking down documentary evidence and Howie’s friends and relatives, charting a path through memories and mythology. Howie, a native Scot, grew up in a hiking family and later enjoyed a hippie lifestyle before leaving his drug-addicted wife with their preschool-age son. He moved to Canada, where he was “on the run” long before his first race, which took place after he was 30. His stamina, flowing hair, and penchant for hydrating with beer defined him. In 1989, he became first to finish the 1,300-mile “Impossibility Race”—in 17 days, nine hours. In 1991, he ran 7,295 kilometers across Canada in 72 days, 10 hours—still the record—and two weeks later, broke his own 1,300-mile record. The book also reveals the relationships, personal demons, and twists of fate that shaped Howie, rendering the legend fully human—fearful and driven, flawed but likable. Beasley, an actor, director, and screenwriter, writes in a cinematic fashion, interspersing flashbacks between chapters with third-person snapshots of Howie’s signature trans-Canada run. He also seamlessly shifts focus from wide-angle settings to character close-ups, packs details into scenes without slowing the pace, and uses the colorful runners’ vernacular that christens a competitor a “manimal,” “alien,” or “freak.” Some may find the style hyperbolic, but they’d likely concede that if the author described a smoke-filled bar, they’d smell it. He achieves a fluid narrative that makes the pages fly by, like the miles beneath Howie’s feet.
A quirky, captivating biography.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77160-338-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Rocky Mountain Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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