Thanks to this intrepid author, Lata Brandisová re-enters the hall of champions to inspire those who come after her.
Biography of a Czech countess who “confront[ed] the warrior-athletes of the Third Reich in a sporting contest so extreme in its dangers that some would question its right to be called sport.”
Askwith (People Power, 2018, etc.) does admirable literary detective work in unearthing the remarkable story of Countess Lata Brandisová (1895-1981), whose early life coincided with an era of glittering aristocratic privilege followed by the catastrophic destruction brought on by World War I. Hailing from a large noble family with Austrian roots in a sprawling inherited estate in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Lata was mostly home-schooled and largely “ungovernable.” With her siblings, she ran wild throughout the estate grounds, and she was passionate about the horses acquired by her father, a former cavalry officer who had “limited cash but plenty of dash.” Bohemian hunters were famous for their riding prowess, and many of the huntsmen were actually English expatriates who competed in the reckless steeplechase, a sport whose premier event was the Grand Pardubice. Yet the privilege to ride in it—or folly for the horses, 29 of which have died during over the past 145 years—fell to the men, at least until World War I shook up the “inertia of the age.” Despite the abolishment of aristocratic titles and the breakup of her family’s inherited lands, Lata grew in confidence and applied for an amateur jockey license in 1927. At the same time, her cousin was elected to the Prague Jockey Club and introduced her to her first equine partner, and she ran her first Grand Pardubice, with disastrous results. Askwith depicts suspensefully Lata’s amazing mettle and perseverance over the next few years despite the notorious difficulty of the race. In 1937, riding against the Nazi-owned top-of-the-line horses (“Himmler’s Cavalry”), Lata won, to the astonishment of 40,000 spectators “mad with joy.”
Thanks to this intrepid author, Lata Brandisová re-enters the hall of champions to inspire those who come after her.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-210-5
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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