A serviceably written yet inspired exploration of the meaning of commitment.
A celebrated long-distance hiker’s account of how she captured the Appalachian Trail speed-hiking record.
For Davis, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail was no ordinary footpath. It was the place where she had met her first love, a man who broke her heart in 2007. Four years later, it became the place to which she once again felt “called” by God to “praise Him with the talents and gifts He had given me.” Davis had by then married a fellow Christian named Brew who had been helping her do something totally new: supported hikes. With his help, she broke the women’s thru-hiking record in 2008. She did not attempt the overall record until 2011, however, since she knew it would involve her somewhat reluctant then-boyfriend Brew. “I don’t know if my husband would ever have agreed to such a difficult, thankless task if we hadn’t planned the adventure directly after we got engaged,” she writes. Davis began her marathon hike in the rugged mountains of Maine, following the A.T. through 12 other states and into “the heart of backcountry Georgia.” Brew faithfully met her with food and water at designated stopping points, while fellow hiking enthusiasts accompanied her along portions of the trail. Over 46 grueling days, Davis endured injuries, illness, emotional meltdowns, sleet storms, extreme heat and stifling humidity, all of which tested the limits of her mind, body, marriage and friendships. In the end, she discovered that her 2,181-mile journey was not just about living out a dream, but about understanding the nature of love. Like the A.T. itself, “love is not always easy and not always fun.” At the same time, it is the truest way to becoming “your best self.”
A serviceably written yet inspired exploration of the meaning of commitment.Pub Date: June 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8253-0693-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Beaufort
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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