For those who spend significant time on snowbound mountain slopes, this is an informative and powerful cautionary lesson.
One of Alaska's leading avalanche experts explores the terrible beauty of avalanches and the human toll they exact each year.
Fredston (Rowing to Latitude, 2002) joined with her husband, Doug Fesler, to create in 1986 the Alaska Mountain Safety Center, helping to forecast avalanches and protect rescuers trying to dig out avalanche victims. To the uninformed, avalanches may seem like random “act of God” events. But Fredston and her husband, “avalanche chasers” who could witness snow slides from the rattling windows of their mountaintop home, argue that many, if not most, avalanches can be predicted and avoided. Actually, one of the most effective safety measures is to induce the avalanche intentionally with explosives while the avalanche's “slide path” is free of humans. The husband-and-wife team not only spent much of their time doing just that, but they have actually derived income by creating “designer avalanches” for snowbound B-movies. Nevertheless, Fredston is generally more somber and serious, as she describes the emotional toll of digging out the ever-mounting number of Alaska avalanche fatalities, many of them acquaintances. Too often, Fredston argues, skiers, snowmobilers and mountaineers ignore the warning signs. Moreover, basic safety measures like netting, crevicing and protective tree-planting that are widespread in the Alps and the western U.S. are ignored in Alaska. Fredston brings passion and a wealth of experience to her story, although her writing occasionally borders on the gushy. Talking of her first meeting with future husband Doug, she writes: “He was such an avalanche guru that it didn't feel any more appropriate to fall for him than to date my doctor—or Davy Crockett or Abe Lincoln, for that matter.” And though she’s a capable writer, it's difficult to avoid the repetitious when describing one crunching avalanche after the next.
For those who spend significant time on snowbound mountain slopes, this is an informative and powerful cautionary lesson.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101249-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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