A good fit for every runner’s library.
Longtime runner and journalist Hanc (The Essential Marathoner, 1996, etc.) dashes off a history-studded travelogue about his participation in The Last Marathon.
That’s what the Antarctica Marathon was called back in 1995, when Marathon Tours and Travel owner Tom Gilligan founded the race. The Last Marathon was an appealing hook for runners, who had a natural fetish for conquering exotic terrain. But Antarctica? If the brutal swings in temperature don’t sound intimidating, consider being subdued by “the gluey Antarctic mud.” Nonetheless, Hanc decided to take the challenge and enter the race on the occasion of its tenth anniversary and his 50th birthday. Only four miles into it, he writes, “I knew. This was really going to suck.” Soon, exhausted and driven by raw adrenaline, his mantra became, “Why am I doing this?” He wasn’t the only one. Some of the frustrated runners simply “slowed down, took their time, submitted to the mud, and tried to enjoy the bizarreness of the whole thing.” The race isn't necessarily about breaking records, and the actual marathon often pales in comparison to the challenge of simply getting there. In 2001, the sea was so violent on the voyage through the Drake Passage that the marathon was canceled. Undaunted, participants ran 422 laps aboard the ship. Weaving together the histories of early Antarctic exploration and modern marathons, Hanc includes sections on the battle over possession of the continent and the noticeable effects of global warming and increased tourism. Interviewing runners present and past, most of them ordinary people facing an extraordinary challenge, Hanc digs for the answer to one key question: “Why anyone would want to run a marathon in what is frequently called the Last Place on Earth?”
A good fit for every runner’s library.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55652-738-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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