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RACE TO THE POLAR SEA

THE HEROIC ADVENTURES OF ELISHA KENT KANE

A terrifically accessible account of this wide-eyed, extraordinarily intrepid adventurer’s thrilling and chilling exploits.

Pertinent new insights into the life and Arctic treks of an important 19th-century American explorer.

Having stumbled upon the logbook and other effects of Elisha Kent Kane (1820–57), Canadian author McGoogan (Ancient Mariner, 2004, etc.) sets out to rehabilitate this previously neglected figure. Going in search of English adventurer Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in 1845 while looking for the Northwest Passage, Kane discovered instead the Great Glacier of Humboldt and the Kennedy Channel; he also recorded many valuable observations of polar geography, wildlife and Inuit culture. Scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, he determined to make a glorious reputation for himself and was undeterred by several severe bouts of rheumatic fever in his late teens. He studied medicine and took to the sea, serving on vessels to the Far East, Egypt and Africa. At the instigation of Franklin’s wife, lobbying tirelessly to generate a search expedition for her husband, Kane made two trips to the Arctic in search of Sir John and the legendary Open Polar Sea, which was supposed to flow across the pole. The first, as ship’s surgeon on the Advance in 1850, resulted in the discovery of the Beechey Island graves of three men from Franklin’s expedition. A monumental second voyage commanded by Kane lasted for two brutal years, 1853-5, as he and his increasingly mutinous crew tried to drive upward through Baffin Bay and Smith Sound. They reached farther north than any other explorers had and produced sketches of the fantastic landscape, but the scurvy-ridden and starving men survived a second winter only with the help of Inuit tribes. Returning as a hero, still courting the controversial spiritualist Maggie Fox, Kane managed to produce his rapturous Arctic Explorations before dying of a stroke at age 37.

A terrifically accessible account of this wide-eyed, extraordinarily intrepid adventurer’s thrilling and chilling exploits.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-58243-440-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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