Manages to pump new life into some well-documented tales.
A thorough, mostly partisan analysis of the great explorer’s life and work.
In ex-Navyman Rose’s second book on Byrd (the first, Assault on Eternity: Richard E. Byrd and the Exploration of Antarctica 1946–47, was published in 1980), the author attempts to both document Byrd’s life and deal with many of the criticisms directed at him. Rose (Power at Sea: The Breaking Storm, 1919–1945, 2006, etc.) begins by sketching Byrd’s adolescence. These passages contain a prescient example of a criticism that would continue to dog the explorer throughout his life—his capacity to exaggerate the truth when recalling his journeys—as Rose drags some truth out of the contradictions surrounding the tale of Byrd traveling across the globe alone at the tender age of 11. The bulk of the book is comprised of Byrd’s epic adventures. Details surrounding his controversial flight over the North Pole in 1926 (for which he earned the Medal of Honor) are among the most interesting, with Rose delivering a compelling case against the critics who scorned Byrd’s claims to have made this audacious trip. Byrd’s trans-Atlantic journey in 1927 also garners close attention, but it’s the thrilling recollections of his trips to Antarctica, many of which are based on the intrepid explorer’s own words, that really impress. Of particular interest is the five-month period in 1934 that Byrd spent in isolation manning a meteorological station, barely escaping with his life after suffering carbon-monoxide poisoning. Rose effectively captures the brutal conditions and the deterioration in his mental and physical health during this period, as he goes from writing eloquently about the aurora australis to barely recognizing himself as he looked in the mirror. The author makes no attempt to mask the rampant egotism and often impenetrably stubborn nature of his subject, but he generally expresses a clear affection for him throughout.
Manages to pump new life into some well-documented tales.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1782-0
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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