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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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