A fascinating look at the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, a lonely and often dangerous trek in freezing temperatures over 1,023 miles of daunting wildlands from Whitehorse, Canada, to Fairbanks, Alaska. Traditionalists created the Yukon Quest some 15 years ago as a counterpoint to the commercialized Iditarod, and as a way of celebrating mushing in its raw form. A roving correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Balzar devoted more than half a year getting to know the male and female drivers of the 1998 race and following them along the racing trail. Here he presents a firsthand account of the race, addresses social issues such as the ongoing debate between animal-rights advocates and the partisans of the sport (he sides with the mushers), and offers historical facts about the Yukon Territory—in particular, the Gold Rush of the late 1800s. But Balzar is at his best when he focuses on the mushers, showing the details involved in devising a game plan (from selecting proper equipment to caring for and handling the dogs), and providing clues to the mindset needed to enter and endure such a race. Besides an adventurous spirit and a love for the wild country, mushers must also share a symbiotic relationship with their dog team. And while the drivers can’t truly prepare for such life-threatening problems as losing a dog, succumbing to hallucinations, or becoming disoriented from the cold and exhaustion, they must be prepared to respond to any threat. A harrowing experience by the eventual winner near the end of the race illustrates just how perilous it can be for even the best- prepared. As a bonus, Balzar creates wondrous landscapes of the wild north country, depicting even more dramatically the cold, solitary ordeal of the courageous drivers and dogs who commit themselves to this demanding race. (Maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-5949-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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