Verbose, engrossing tale of old-school hazard-embracing manhood.
Obsessively detailed account of a life spent recklessly adventuring, by “the world’s greatest living explorer” (according to Guinness).
Fiennes (Race to the Pole: Tragedy, Heroism, and Scott’s Antarctic Quest, 2004, etc.), an older cousin of actors Ralph and Joseph, would seem like a British archetype of eccentric bluster were his feats of endurance not so remarkable. Although he has written about them in specific narratives, this book presents a panoramic view of his life. Conceived during World War II on his father’s last leave prior to being killed, it was perhaps inevitable that the youthful baronet would yearn for heroism. As an adolescent at the prestigious Eton school, he earned the titular epithet via numerous pranks involving explosives and wall climbing. Hungry for military adventure, he joined the SAS (akin to Special Forces); realizing his reckless streak would keep him from advancing, he then volunteered for combat in Oman, helping the Sultan suppress a Marxist rebellion. Although tempted by the life of a mercenary soldier, Fiennes was deeply in love with a young woman named Ginny; he married her to keep from losing her, then embarked on a seemingly endless string of risky endeavors while disingenuously mourning time spent away from home. Beginning with a 1970 expedition to survey a remote Norwegian glacier, he pursued numerous sponsored journeys to the far ends of the earth. (“Spend no money on mounting an expedition” is his business motto.) He devoted most of the ’70s to an ambitious plan to circumnavigate the globe via the two poles, with no less a sponsor than Prince Charles. This led to more ambitious punishments, like a plan “to reach the North Pole with no outside support and no air contact.” Even after losing fingers to frostbite, Fiennes kept going, ultimately attacking both Everest and Eiger, as well as returning to the Arctic. The narrative becomes a blur of technique, landscape and the baffling dangers faced by Fiennes and his long-suffering wife and associates.
Verbose, engrossing tale of old-school hazard-embracing manhood.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-340-95169-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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