Roper has only spotty success in finding a deeper meaning in Unsoeld’s story, but the story itself is always fascinating.
A solid account of the exploits of American mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, who made his reputation in 1963 as the first to climb Everest by the formidable West Face, a feat still not duplicated.
Unsoeld, who died at age 52 in an avalanche in 1979, was a professor of philosophy and wilderness guide between expeditions. Novelist and mountaineer Roper (Cuervo Tales, 1993, etc.) believes Unsoeld’s life also illustrates the transformation of mountaineering that occurred during the 1960s and ’70s. Roper follows in the footsteps of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1997), which launched a flood of books describing extreme adventures accompanied by disasters that might have been avoided by strict adherence to the virtues of a previous era. Until the ’60s, climbing was pure sport. Climbers earned a living elsewhere; even large expeditions were assumed to work as a team. Books about mountaineering extolled bravery, suffering, and self-sacrifice, never mentioning conflicts and bickering. The “me decade” of the ’70s saw the flowering of professionals who could earn a living climbing mountains. These were superb athletes, but fiercely ambitious and self-absorbed. An intense competitive spirit appeared, and writers happily recorded the cliques, feuds, and controversies that accompanied each expedition. Roper concentrates on the landmark 1976 conquest of Nanda Devi, a remote and difficult Himalayan peak. Led by Unsoeld, the expedition mixed traditionalists with prickly, media-savvy, virtuoso climbers and included Unsoeld’s daughter Devi, herself a skilled mountaineer. She died struggling to reach the peak, and Roper tells a story packed with adventure, suffering, scandal, heroism, and controversy. Having the benefit of many written accounts of the expedition, the author tries to tease the facts from conflicting versions, draw lessons from the epic feat, and explain both Devi’s death and her father’s response to it, which seemed even to some friends to be almost creepily serene.
Roper has only spotty success in finding a deeper meaning in Unsoeld’s story, but the story itself is always fascinating.Pub Date: March 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26153-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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