Narcissus in Nikes.
Running Times senior writer Toor (Writing/Eastern Washington Univ.; The Pig and I: Why It’s So Easy to Love an Animal, and So Hard to Love a Man, 2005, etc.) charts her transformation from exercise-resistant “pretentious little intellectual” in college to 40-something ultramarathoner.
Fifteen years after forswearing her Oreo-eating ways, Toor has run more than “forty marathons and ultras” and won “a handful of small boutiquey races in mountainous, out-of-the-way places” like the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the Himalayas. She has also become one of a dozen or so athletes selected by Clif Bar as pacers, who volunteer in helping less-experienced runners achieve their PRs (personal records, or personal best times at a given distance) in marathons throughout the country. Toor’s somewhat fractured collection of short essays on all things running offers many helpful maxims for long-distance runners, ranging from what to expect after a marathon (“You finish the race and walk around feeling fat. Bloated. Porked out. Your whole everything is swollen like a bruise”) to a detailed description of Ride and Tie events, lengthy races involving teams comprised of a pair of runners and a horse. No matter what the subject, though, the spotlight always returns to, and shines brightest on, the author and her accomplishments. She doesn’t hesitate to relate why she prefers running with men (“you can talk about nothing for hours”) or offer reasons why she’s had trouble in relationships (“I don’t cook, and I’m kind of mean”), admitting she’s guilty of that “least appealing” runnerly trait: “blinkered self-absorption.” She writes: “Sometimes, when I’m racing, the thing that keeps my mind off the discomfort I am feeling is the story I will tell about it when I’m finished.” For Toor, the acts of running and writing are seemingly intertwined, so readers will gather that the present volume brought much therapeutic relief.
Narcissus in Nikes.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6033-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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