Weekend warriors who crave physical challenges can use Pyle’s colorful account to kick-start their own adventures.
Photographer and filmmaker Pyle (The India Ride, 2014, etc.) returns with a fast-paced travel memoir about four months that changed his life.
A Canadian living in Shanghai, Pyle writes that his hikes on four sacred western Chinese mountains—Minya Konka, Amne Machin, Mount Kailash, and Kawa Karpo—didn’t lead to his spiritual epiphany or turn him into a “born-again, tree-hugging environmentalist.” Instead, he says, he became a better person due to the physical and mental challenges he overcame while hiking and camping in extreme weather conditions. In July 2013, he set off—with guides, donkeys, a cook, plenty of supplies, and a cameraman for documentary filming—to begin four separate journeys and walk more than 500 kilometers in majestic landscapes. Pyle’s spirited account often describes the local people, such as some older pilgrims who devoutly performed repeated prostrations around Amne Machin. Serious hikers will find helpful cultural information in Pyle’s friendly, first-person narrative; e.g., visitors should circumambulate the mountains because climbing straight to the top is considered sacrilegious. But some readers may be shocked by the high cost (one part of Pyle’s trip to Mount Kailash was about $6,300). Informative notes—descriptions of “trekkers’ feet” and “altitude sickness”—are highlighted in boxes throughout the text. Each mountain hike begins with a small map and ends with the author’s personal travel details (the best months to walk each trail, for example). The bulk of the memoir, however, recounts Pyle’s many difficulties due to changing environments—bitter cold that instantly froze water he was pouring into his oatmeal. The language is often vivid: “Dotted along the sides of the valley above us were several of the white tents that are home to semi-nomadic Tibetan yak herders who take their yaks up to the plateaus in the summer to feed on the lush grass.” Forty-eight gorgeous but disappointingly small color photographs (approximately 4.5 inches by 3 inches) are included.
Weekend warriors who crave physical challenges can use Pyle’s colorful account to kick-start their own adventures.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9928644-1-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Ryan Pyle Productions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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