A buoyant evocation of a thrilling, hardscrabble life.
A vibrant memoir of sled dog racing in the wilds of Alaska.
As a teenager, Pace spent every summer at an outdoor adventure camp in Colorado, living in a covered wagon and learning wilderness survival skills. Returning to the camp as a counselor deepened her love of adventure. Danger, she reveals in her assured and absorbing literary debut, gave her a “jolt of adrenaline” that became an addiction. “Or rather,” she writes, “a purifying ritual.” Six days after graduating from high school, Pace left her home and family in Texas to travel to Montana to live in a one-room log cabin with a man she met online. Although her parents had misgivings, they encouraged her independence and cheered when she enrolled in the University of Montana. After she graduated, she took a summer internship at the Denali National Park Sled Dog Kennels, where she developed “an insatiable love for dogs” and a clear sense of Alaska’s brutal backcountry. The following spring, she accompanied a musher on an “absolutely hellish” 20-mile patrol across slick ice and deep snow. “It was the hardest thing I had ever done,” she recalls, but she was “more scared of living a boring life” than confronting peril. When her marriage ended, Pace, divorced and bereft, became a caretaker for sled dogs, living alone in a small cabin in the wilderness. With temperatures that could plummet to 60 degrees below zero, the author faced the challenges of keeping herself and her dogs alive: not least, chopping firewood and hauling water (the cabin had no running water and no indoor plumbing). Sled dogs, whom she lovingly portrays as having distinct and quirky personalities, were seductive, and racing beckoned irresistibly: Much of the memoir recounts Pace’s training for and racing in the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod, both exhausting, exhilarating, and, as Pace depicts them, glorious feats. Soon, the author and her new love set up their own kennel, devoted to their valiant dogs—and to each other.
A buoyant evocation of a thrilling, hardscrabble life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6240-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
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