For fans, a nostalgic stop in a celebrated oeuvre. For newcomers, a welcome introduction to a veteran of the form.
An investigative journalist’s early work portrays his enduring fascination with human daring.
Krakauer (Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, 2015) gathers essays that were published in magazines such as Smithsonian and Outside from the mid-1980s through the 1990s along with two from 2014. The majority feature awe-inspiring locales that are enlivened by the author’s naturalist eye, and robust action and suspenseful pacing enhance careful explorations of power and innovation. A handful highlight larger-than-life people, including Californian surfer Mark Foo, who drowned at Mavericks (California), “one of the world’s heaviest waves,” and mountaineer Fred Beckey (1923-2017), “the original climbing bum.” Three pieces examine death in the context of industries that include surfing, rock climbing, and wilderness therapy camps. Among the strongest essays is "Loving Them to Death," an exposé on abuse and teen deaths that happened under the neglectful watch of a camp leader. A solid mix of conversations, background, and travel adds up to cleareyed reportage that still shocks. In the reverent, often beautiful "Gates of the Arctic,” memory splices with reflections on the Alaskan Brooks Range and the damaging footprint left by locals and visitors. In two essays, Krakauer considers the future from different angles. In one, the author writes about Mount Rainier and the danger of inevitable mudflows. In the other, Krakauer chronicles his journey with scientists who study microbial life in the hope that it will spark long-term research on Mars. The author effectively balances natural drama with thoughtful reflection and fascinating facts. When the writing is cautionary, it plucks at emotional chords. When it travels wild vistas and tense excursions, it shows Krakauer at his best. A few pieces remain outliers, such as the closing essay, which was delivered as a speech and shuttles toward a reluctant conclusion. A profile of Christopher Alexander, an “iconoclastic architect of international repute,” is less hard-hitting and only mildly interesting.
For fans, a nostalgic stop in a celebrated oeuvre. For newcomers, a welcome introduction to a veteran of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984897-69-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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