The compelling, if at times aggravating, tale of Chisholm's journey from the land of the dead to the thin air of high peaks, told with the help of Bruce, an editor for Self-Help Psychology magazine. In her mid-30s, Chisholm was a wreck: hooked on booze and dope, unable to control her eating, tempering her moods with Nyquil and Sinutabs, fancying she was controlling her weight with a massive daily intake of laxatives, unable to go to work or even get out of bed. Thanks to fate, destiny—call it what you will—she found her way to a rehab group that got the recuperative ball rolling, and coincidentally, in the mid-1980s, Chisholm discovered mountain climbing. She wanted to climb the seven summits, the highest mountains on each continent, and her quest became a bit of an obsession: She wondered if she simply switched one addiction for another. But her motives feel purer than that. She was trying to claw her way out of a deadly slough, and she realized she had to be physically and spiritually up to the challenge. Spiritually, Chisholm discovered God, and readers may feel they have been foisted into a confessional role. Her mantra is ``God's love, God's strength, God's will, I can.'' Inner voices dog her: The pessimist Martha and the perfectionist Ghost in White taunt her unmercifully. Physically, the adventurer's quests were daunting: Kilimanjaro, Denali, Cerro Aconcagua, Everest, mountains that demand resources no non-mountaineer could imagine. Chisholm's excitement at being on the roofs of the world, or at least sitting under the eaves at base camp—highly descriptive, with nuggets of climbing wisdom—is palpable. When Everest eludes Chisholm, and she takes it in stride, readers may sense that she has covered her most impressive terrain. (photos, not seen) (First printing of 60,000; author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-380-97359-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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