A fun adventure story marred by flawed storytelling.
A British cave diver reflects on his career and his participation in a well-known death-defying rescue mission.
When Stanton, who was admittedly apathetic as a youth, watched his first cave-diving documentary at 17, he knew he had found his purpose. He arrived at college the following year and immediately joined both the caving and diving clubs. His love of underground exploration consumed him enough that he dropped out of school and became a firefighter to support his spelunking habit. For the next 38 years, his adventures took him to Britain, Western Europe, and Mexico, where he helped map out underground terrain, boldly experimented with caving equipment, and, on occasion, assisted in the recovery of bodies. Then, in the summer of 2018, a friend told him about a group of teenage Thai football players who had become stranded inside a cave after monsoon rains blocked the exit. Stanton flew to Thailand to assist in the removal of what he believed would be their remains from the cave. Even after he discovered the boys were all alive, he confronted obstacles at every turn: on-again, off-again rains that threatened to flood the caves even more; clumsy and dangerous rescue attempts by unskilled Navy SEALS; and a lack of proper equipment to save the boys. Using an unorthodox recovery method, Stanton led a successful rescue mission that earned him worldwide acclaim. The tale of the author’s exploits is undeniably exciting, but the text, co-written by Dealy, is weighed down by pedestrian details that slow the narrative pace. This problem is further exacerbated by the way he braids chapters pertaining to the rescue with those pertaining to highlights from his long career in cave diving. The result is an excessively detailed book most likely to appeal only to those who share Stanton’s subterranean passions.
A fun adventure story marred by flawed storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-919-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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