A colorful, entertaining journey with a voluble guide.
A trip to discover the “spirit and soma” of the formidable peaks.
Poet and award-winning writer Twigger (Red Nile: A Biography of the World’s Greatest River, 2014, etc.) takes on the mighty Himalayas in a sprawling, panoramic chronicle of history and adventure. Drawing on mountaineers’ memoirs, histories, and his own experiences, the author offers quirky facts, idiosyncratic observations, and vivid profiles of some of the most daring climbers. Twigger explains the biology of altitude sickness, caused by the body’s efforts “to re-establish the same levels of oxygen in each cell as would be experienced at sea level.” Besides nausea, headache, and dizziness, breathing at a high altitude causes a mental state similar to intoxication, attracting seekers of spiritual enlightenment. In thin air, he was told, they “have to listen to their breath. This reminds them that they are human after all. And they mistake this insight for something wonderful.” Twigger investigates the many religious groups prevalent in the mountains: “Hindus, Muslims, Bon worshippers, Lepchas, Mishmis and Christians.” But Buddhism is “the central Himalayan religion.” He also steeps himself in prevalent superstitions, including the power of curses and the elusive Yeti. “Imaginary creatures,” he reflects, “transform a banal journey into an exciting one.” From his recounting of mountaineering expeditions, it’s clear that there is nothing banal about climbing in the Himalayas. Twigger is at his liveliest following the treks and travails of climbers such as Col. Francis Younghusband, an intrepid Englishman who crossed the challenging Mustagh Pass in 1887; his compatriot Aleister Crowley (“corpulent heroin addict and alcoholic”), who, in 1904 made a climb using the newly invented crampons; George Curzon, a fascist sympathizer; and author Jon Krakauer, a client (i.e., paying) climber, whose record of an Everest expedition was made into a movie. Twigger peppers the book with digressions and philosophical musings—on the nature of reality, the power of gurus, mapping, and other topics. “To map is to be,” he writes. “The map-maker seeks to control the world through recreating it in an abstract form.”
A colorful, entertaining journey with a voluble guide.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-535-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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