Although the narrative occasionally veers off course, horse lovers will adore this inspiring and spirited memoir.
A young Englishwoman takes on the world’s longest and most difficult horse race.
In 2013, Prior-Palmer came across a photograph of the Mongol Derby: “long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wild and free—in Mongolia.” The deadline was fast approaching, and the race’s organizer gave her a discount to help defray the costly entry fee. The Derby, a “truly peculiar invention,” is a seven-day, 1,000-kilometer race on 25 wild Mongolian ponies, descendants, writes the author, of “Genghis Khan’s famed Takhi horses, the ones that shouldered his empire’s postal system from the thirteenth century onwards.” Every 40 kilometers, at stations called urtuus, tired horses are replaced with new ones; riders rest, eat, and use the toilets (holes in the ground). Each of the competitors has a rough map of the course, a not-always-reliable GPS device, and “nylon endurance saddles.” In this feisty and exhilarating debut memoir, Prior-Palmer smoothly recounts what happened over her momentous week in August. Right at the start, she fell behind: “Where to go? I was hoping to follow someone….I can see only sun.” Over the next seven days, she fought aching bruises, torrential rain, brutal heat, and a rough fall. She continuously scoured the vast horizon for “hamster cities,” the holes of which could seriously injure a horse, and she dodged herds of nibbling goats while the horses dealt with Mongolian families’ nipping dogs. The author personalizes the horses with names: Brolly, Dunwoody and “7.” As she raced, carrying a copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, she channeled her Aunt Lucinda, “my go-to ahead of any equestrian event,” to help her get through each arduous day. After the apparent winner was penalized for overheating her horse, the author, who was second, was declared the winner—the youngest ever and the first woman.
Although the narrative occasionally veers off course, horse lovers will adore this inspiring and spirited memoir.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948226-19-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
SEEN & HEARD
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