A few too many rock faces, but still an appealing blend of climbing drama and personal candor. (b&w photos throughout)
In an unvarnished debut, Hill shares climbing experiences, offers technical tips, and portrays her emotional ties to other elite climbers.
As a 14-year-old California girl, Hill discovered rock climbing in 1975, when she tagged along with her sister's crew to Joshua Tree National Park. Small, but strong and flexible from gymnastics, she quickly fell in with J-Tree's top climbers; nicknamed “Little Herc,” she honed her skills on huge boulders named EBGB's and Trespassers Will Be Violated, while members of the wild bunch climbed naked at night or with a noose around the neck. Hill developed world-class abilities at the climbing citadel of Yosemite National Park, where she made repeated ascents of the famous walls El Capitan and Half Dome. Her portrait of Yosemite's talented climbers skillfully juxtaposes their artistry in the air with their freeloading creepiness on the ground; shoplifting and consumption of tourist leftovers were regular practices, and when a marijuana-laden plane crashed in the Sierras, the fit climbers became competitive entrepreneurs. Hill confined her energies to legal games, beginning with Survival of the Fittest, a televised four-event competition that she won four years in a row. By the mid-1980s, she was winning most of the European sport-climbing competitions despite French attempts to rewrite the rules to benefit national favorite Catherine Destivelle. On the flip side of Hill's career success is an abundance of personal heartache. Chuck Bludworth, who introduced her to climbing, died on a dramatic ascent of Argentina’s 23,000-foot Mt. Aconcaqua. High falls and avalanches kill other good friends. A romantic relationship with John Long goes nowhere slowly, and Hill's marriage to climber/businessman Russ Raffa, made without adequate thought, fails quickly, though a wedding picture of the couple hanging in harnesses from a cliff did make Bride’s magazine.
A few too many rock faces, but still an appealing blend of climbing drama and personal candor. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04981-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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