An admirable mixture of death-defying polar treks and environmental awareness.
An earnest, cheerful memoir by an intrepid adventurer, the first to walk to both the North and South Poles.
A restless youth in 1970s Britain, Swan began adventuring by bicycling alone across Africa. Once back home, he decided to fulfill his childhood obsession with Antarctic explorers by repeating Captain Robert Scott’s legendary 1912 walk across Antarctica to the South Pole. Scott and his men died on the way back, but Swan planned on only a one-way trip to the American South Pole base. He was not a mountaineer, scientist or celebrity; he had no money or polar experience; and in the ’80s no commercial presence existed in Antarctica, only national research stations. Official organizations refused to cooperate, but readers will enjoy Swan’s account of five years of relentless pestering, writing and public speaking necessary to acquire millions of dollars, supplies, a ship and a team that fulfilled his dream in 1985. The horrendous 900-mile walk was no anticlimax, as each of the three men set off dragging a 350-pound sled containing all their provisions but no radio. Having attained his goal, Swan recruited another team and walked to the North Pole in 1989, a task difficult then and impossible now because of melting icepack. By this time he had grown concerned with the deteriorating polar environment, and the book’s final 100 pages are focused on the author’s efforts to spread the word as he sails the world in his vessel 2041 (the year the international treaty protecting Antarctica expires), teaching, recruiting volunteers and performing tasks such as removing mountains of Antarctic garbage.
An admirable mixture of death-defying polar treks and environmental awareness.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3175-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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