Its release so soon after the widely publicized Pennsylvania mining disaster and rescue should boost the book commercially,...
A strikingly told story of a Canadian mining catastrophe.
In 1958, in the prettily named Springhill, Nova Scotia, a rush of subterranean energy compressed the deep chambers of the town's coal mine, thrusting the floors of the tunnels against their roofs. Two-and-a-half miles underground, dozens of men were trapped in small pockets of space soon to be in utter darkness, the maze of tunnels crushed about them, gas seeping here and there. Through interviews with survivors, the autobiography of the local doctor, and, most fascinatingly, a study of survival strategies conducted after the disaster, the award-winning Greene (Praying for Sheetrock, 1991, etc.) recreates the extraordinary efforts undertaken by those trapped and those on top to keep themselves from flying apart under the circumstances. She tracks in excruciating detail the actions of two groups of men—seven in one, twelve in another—as they tended the injured, scrounged for food, devised ways to make contact, considered whether or not to cut off one man's arm that had been pinned inside a wall of fallen coal, forcing him into a standing slouch. The last of those men were finally freed nine days later, though 76 others died. In the still-segregated state of Georgia, authorities were unpleasantly surprised to find a black miner in a group they opportunistically invited down for a celebratory vacation; he was also shunned by some for breaking the miners’ code when he allowed himself to be singled out as Canadian Man of the Year. Greene concludes with a portrait of the ghastly emotional consequences of the ordeal that did not disappear in the light of day. Some of her miner profiles are better than others, and a few are obviously patched together from too-scant material, but she captures the gloom in all its manifestations.
Its release so soon after the widely publicized Pennsylvania mining disaster and rescue should boost the book commercially, but this sensitive account stands on its own artistic merits. (8 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100559-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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