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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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