A nice job: Like all good sports narratives, this is more about meeting challenges than winning titles.
An evocative account by New York Times reporter Johnson of his participation in the grueling Badwater Ultramarathon, describing the race itself and his reasons for running it.
After Johnson’s brother Gary committed suicide in 1997, Johnson began running again. Unlike Gary, he had never been much of an athlete, but as he neared 40 he found himself thinking more and more about his brother’s death and his own mortality. Assigned to the Times sports desk, he interviewed Liz Smith, who was about to run some race in Death Valley. When Smith told him about her upcoming race (the Badwater) and about other ultramarathons, he became intrigued and eventually decided to run the Badwater himself. Like all ultramarathons, Badwater is about endurance, not speed. The course (135 miles long) begins in Death Valley (282 feet below sea level) and finishes in the Sierra Nevada (at the trail-head to Mount Whitney). It takes place in mid-July, and a successful competitor must finish the course in less than 60 hours. Thinking that running the race might help him to understand some of the questions that troubled him, Johnson took a year’s leave to prepare himself. He learned all that he could about the race and its history, and he interviewed other Badwater competitors—such as the handicapped Vietnam vet Dan Jensen, the legendary Ulrich (who once pulled a rickshaw across Death Valley), and Mick Justin (who advised him that, to finish Badwater, “you just have to want it badly enough”). With his two siblings in charge of supplies, Johnson set off on the 1999 race. Blisters slowed him down, exhaustion brought on terrifying hallucinations, the heat was lethal, but the author endured, choosing to go on rather than give up.
A nice job: Like all good sports narratives, this is more about meeting challenges than winning titles.Pub Date: July 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52617-7
Page Count: 287
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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