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
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
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