A fast-paced, insightful, positive account by a world-class runner.
A former top model recounts becoming an ultramarathon runner in this debut memoir.
“I’m not interested in running,” writes Graglia. “I want to push myself beyond…ultra running…beyond running.” The author’s life is in many ways one of extremes. Raised in Taggia, Italy, he worked in his family’s floral export business until a split with his girlfriend when he was in his 20s led him to search for a new life in America. In 2007, he flew to Miami, where he was spotted by the owner of a prestigious modeling agency. He was catapulted into a dazzling new career that saw him shot by the renowned photographer Steven Klein and in his downtime dancing on a table at a concert next to P. Diddy. Graglia later became jaded by the life of excess and sexual harassment that came with modeling and yearned for a change after contemplating suicide. Stumbling across a book on ultrarunning led him to train for the Keys 100, which demanded running 160 miles per week. Overcoming numerous setbacks, the author describes honing himself into an exceptional athlete who would go on to win the infamous Badwater Ultramarathon. Graglia’s memoir energetically fluctuates between describing his earlier days of hedonism (“This was à la Scarface when Tony Montana has a mountain of coke on a platter”) and his bond with nature forged later as a runner: “You’ll never forget when you popped out of that trail and a glacier opened up in front of you.” The author’s writing brims with optimism: “What I learned in the process is that you can transform yourself. You can reinvent yourself as many times as you want. That’s the beauty of the American spirit, and it had always attracted me.” But he is prone to repeating himself, such as referring to his one-man tent as a “coffin” more than once. Fans of ultrarunning may also be disappointed not to read a more up-to-date account of Graglia’s career—his 2018 Badwater victory is only mentioned briefly in the epilogue and his momentous 2020 Moab 240 win is not covered. Still, the author’s salacious insider view of the fashion industry, coupled with his enthusiastic discussion of ultrarunning, makes this a unique and compelling read that may inspire others to seek personal change.
A fast-paced, insightful, positive account by a world-class runner.Pub Date: May 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-452117-6
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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