A thrilling account of a dangerous but tantalizing aspiration.
A pilot recounts three attempts to reach the magnetic north pole by plane.
While at an air show in Wisconsin in 1978, debut author Taylor and his two buddies Pat Epps and Verner Martin decided to embark upon a “fantasy mission”: reach the magnetic north pole by aircraft. Taylor, Epps, and Martin—nicknamed Super, Klondike, and Zip respectively—determined their “ever-wandering” mark was somewhere along the southern border of the Arctic Ocean, piled into Epp’s single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, and began the 2,000-plus–mile journey. They were frightfully unprepared—they didn’t have a weather radar or any survival gear—and intended to make their way by magnetic compass alone. The author’s goal was to “roll the pole”—an “aerobatic gesture” that entails inverting the aircraft while directly over the magnetic north pole, something no one had ever done before. However, a persistent engine problem they couldn’t confidently diagnose compelled them to abort the trip. Taylor, though, never gave up on his dream and made two other attempts in 1979 and 1980. The author vividly describes all three attempts and the challenges posed not only by the inhospitable elements, but by the distance between his eagerness for adventure and responsible preparation. More than a pilot’s tale, this is an account of the insatiable ambition for more, a candidly personal chronicle in the spirit of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Airman’s Odyssey. The author explains that his “memoir is not all about airplanes. It’s about a few people and their relationships. It’s about some ambitions, dreams, sacrifices and failures. And, in a loosely framed way, it’s about their achievements and how those achievements led to other challenges.” Taylor’s account is a gripping one, told with humor and without a whiff of gratuitous melodrama. Also, his philosophical asides are intriguing, especially regarding the reasons he’s so powerfully drawn to the “experience of isolation and imminent peril.” This is an engagingly thoughtful book about the lust for life and the sometimes-inscrutable form such a lust assumes.
A thrilling account of a dangerous but tantalizing aspiration.Pub Date: May 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9987528-1-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Full Quark Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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