Action-filled yet thoughtful, with primary appeal for serious mountaineering students, and selling potential within the...
An unusual memoir-cum-spiritual-meditation attempts to locate (both literally and figuratively) the English mountaineer George Mallory, who disappeared on Mount Everest in 1924.
Messner (The Crystal Horizon, not reviewed) was the first individual to climb Everest without oxygen, and the first to climb all 14 of the world’s tallest (over 8,000 meters) mountains. He sees in the gentlemanly and idealistic Mallory the standard-bearer for a bygone age of “amateur” mountaineering, and he recreates the narrative of Mallory’s several Everest expeditions through an unusual merger of Mallory’s journals, writings, and imaginary reactions to the ongoing Everest drama. This tactic proves less unwieldy than it sounds, due to Messner’s clean narrative line, and it adds verisimilitude to the detailed accounts of the expeditions, which feel both historicized and hair-raising; the reader certainly absorbs the seat-of-the-pants, chipper yet dangerous spirit of these early mountaineering efforts. The author clarifies the important role Mallory and his peers played in normalizing the pursuit, despite long-thorny relations between individual cliques of climbers, and between Britain, Tibet, and China. Mallory and an associate died on the notorious 1924 expedition; both his survivors and Messner were struck by the juxtaposition of Mallory’s grace and skill and the seeming inevitability of his demise. The author also provides an arch account of the progress of Everest’s commercialization, stoked by rivalry between British and Chinese expedition teams, which led to the installation of ropes and aluminum ladders across the mountain's precarious ascents, and then to the contemporary congestion of “tour operators and professional guides, more concerned with profit than with safety, [who] turned a spiritual quest into a cold-blooded accomplishment.” He concludes with the 1999 discovery and burial of Mallory’s body, asserting that although the master likely failed to reach the summit, Mallory remains the spiritual father of high-altitude mountaineering.
Action-filled yet thoughtful, with primary appeal for serious mountaineering students, and selling potential within the “extreme sports” demographic.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26806-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
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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