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THE HORIZONTAL EVEREST

Name: THE HORIZONTAL EVEREST
Author: Jerry Kobalenko
ISBN: 1-56947-266-1

EXTREME JOURNEYS ON ELLESMERE ISLAND

by Jerry Kobalenko ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Hard travel in a land both severe and—this is the neat trick—beckoning. (photographs, maps)

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If you like your landscapes cold, quiet, and austere, welcome to Ellesmere Island, photojournalist Kobalenko's spiritual (and part-time) home, where you needn't bother with thermometers or maps because you really don't want to know.

It’s up north: “Think of the little metal disk that sits on top of a globe,” writes the author. “Ellesmere is under that.” Kobalenko has logged more miles on the island's 76,000 square miles than any known human, with the exception of the Greenlander Nukapinguaq. He is drawn to its “physical beauty, its cold, its nontechnical terrain, its isolation . . . its unwalked expanses, its alien flavor, [which] all felt like a purer form of my own inner geography.” Keeping his observations and historical anecdotes as spare and flinty as the land, Kobalenko coaxes a very wild portrait of a place where you can sled along behind dogs under Northern Lights for weeks at a time, have a fine chance of coming eyeball-to-eyeball with a polar bear, or eat your whisky rather than drink it (just leave it out in the 70-below chill). The author delights in following in the footsteps of men and women who went before him. Admiral Peary spent time on the island, as did a host of lesser-lights in the Arctic exploration community, many of them (Hans Krüger, Alfred Björling, Otto Sverdrup) meeting dreadful ends on the spot. Kobalenko’s search for mementos takes him all over the island, from one extreme end—literally and figuratively—the other. In the process he witnesses rainbow-colored lenticular clouds, white wolves that don't fear humans, “the best-known rock on Ellesmere” (an example of his wispy, dry humor), and sites where ancient people lived, though “God knows how these early Stone Age cultures survived.”

Hard travel in a land both severe and—this is the neat trick—beckoning. (photographs, maps)

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-56947-266-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.