A contemplative, soul-searching account of the death of the author’s beloved father and how she used long-distance running...
A female runner learns more about herself with each race she runs.
Arnold, a Santa Fe–based contributing editor at Outside magazine, shares the specifics of her childhood and the relationship she had with her father, a photographer for National Geographic, a profession she respected even as a child (“just the thought of this gave me a little shiver of pride”). When he fell terminally ill, the author embarked on a search to find out who he really was and why he left her mother when she was a young girl. In meticulous detail, Arnold recounts the many times she and her sister visited their father over the years and the ways in which he pushed her to do more than she thought she could. The first example was a six-mile race she ran at the age of 7, an event that set the author up to be a dedicated runner for life. She used running to deal with her father’s death, to overcome her doubts as a mother, and to find herself in each phase of her life. Inviting descriptions of the surrounding countryside, the natural highs of extreme exercise, and the pursuit of a peaceful existence balance the monotony of learning how Arnold prepares for each race, each one seemingly longer than the last. She describes setting personal goals prior to each race and how she pushed through the pain and self-doubt to finish. Interwoven with stories of her father and running are the author’s reflections on being a mother of two girls and life with her husband, who also runs but who gives Arnold the space and freedom to pursue her own goals. Although overlong, Arnold’s memoir will appeal to runners of all types, whether they participate in short-distance races or ultralong endurance tests.
A contemplative, soul-searching account of the death of the author’s beloved father and how she used long-distance running as a way to heal from the grief.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-425-28465-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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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