A highflying, electrifying story of a treacherous sport in which every triumph is an eye blink away from becoming a disaster.
The breathtaking highs and life-threatening plunges of the most extreme stuntmen on Earth.
Keep your mixed martial arts, parcours and BMX bikes; you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen the point-of-view video of these free-flying pilots soaring in their homemade wingsuits over some of the most extreme terrain on the planet. In this riveting journalistic account, freelance writer Higgins chronicles the evolution of the sport from simple parachuting to BASE jumping (the acronym stands for building, antennae, span and Earth, which serve as launch points) to the development of these soaring, superherolike armored flight suits. The book is full of colorful characters but largely focuses on the contrasts between two of the most charismatic pilots, both of whom seek the holy grail of the sport: to land without using a parachute. The most famous is Jeb Corliss Jr., an adrenaline junkie who is most famous for a spectacular 2013 jump off China’s Mount Jianglang, popularized in a startling online video called “Grinding the Crack.” Despite being backed by multimillion-dollar sponsors, Corliss can’t seem to avoid trouble—e.g., being imprisoned for a spoiled jump off the Empire State Building in 2006 or carving a good chunk of his leg off during a 2012 flight in South Africa. Corliss’ counterpart is Gary Connery, the do-it-yourself British stuntman who famously doubled for the queen during the James Bond stunt at the 2012 Olympics. This is thrilling reporting, but Higgins responsibly never avoids the fatal risks involved, and neither do the pilots. A graphic account of the death of Corliss’ best friend, Dwain Weston, who slammed into Colorado’s Royal Gorge Bridge at 120 mph, punctuates the inherent danger. For anyone who finds these kinds of emotional and precise accounts of risk, ambition and victory irresistible, this is a must-read.
A highflying, electrifying story of a treacherous sport in which every triumph is an eye blink away from becoming a disaster.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-465-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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