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
Another big Lenny B. bio, jam-packed with accomplishment and angst. This is not a terrible book, and there are occasional passages of nice insight. Ultimately, however, the limitations that biographer Secrest admits at the outset prove to be too much for her. She is not a music historian, her previous subjects mostly having been figures from architecture and the visual arts (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1992, etc.), and her self-professed inability to evaluate Bernstein as composer exacerbates the inherent difficulties of writing his life so soon after his death. ``Various family members, close friends, and colleagues'' refused to talk to her because the Bernstein estate was contracted to another biographer (presumably Humphrey Burton, author of Leonard Bernstein, p. 260); for the same reason, she did not have access to the ``vast Bernstein archives.'' There were, of course, still plenty of folks who would talk (and talk and talk) to her about the maestro, and they had a lot to say, on every now-familiar subject from L.B.'s ambivalent sexuality to his podium manners, his business acumen, and his skills as father and teacher. If it were not for the thematic and chronological connective passages that display Secrest's skill as a biographer, the book could be called Reminiscences on Bernstein. Predictably, not all of the lengthy, sometimes rambling, quotations are of equal merit; all are self- interested and some don't make sense. We hear much about Bernstein's conflicts—conducting vs. composing, his attraction to men vs. women—but in the absence of an overview of his creative legacy (which simply may not be possible at this early date), the reader winds up feeling merely exhausted by Lenny's energy level. Another book for the growing shelf from which some Maynard Solomon or musical Walter Jackson Bate will have to winnow when the time comes to write a critical biography rather than the Bernstein story. (100 b&w photos) (First printing of 35,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40731-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
The daughter of Boston's beloved maestro transposes the familiar laments of a star's adult child into the world of classical music. In the course of his 50-year tenure as conductor of the Boston Pops orchestra, Arthur Fiedler emerged as a true celebrity. Beyond his musical flair and dashing appearance, he exhibited a knack for marketing. He made his reputation by organizing America's first annual series of free outdoor symphony orchestra concerts on Boston's Charles River Esplanade. On taking over the Pops in 1930, he built a national following, and in his last decades, the PBS ``Evening at Pops'' television broadcasts cemented his fame. The Arthur Fiedler whom the public adored, however, turns out— surprise!—to have distanced himself from his family, immersing himself in his career and continuing to live the high life while on tour. When at home, he would show himself to be misanthropic, miserly, and alcoholic. Fiedler fille details in a clear style how this behavior impeded her personal growth. After a withdrawn, troubled childhood, she came to have difficulties of her own with alcohol and searched into adulthood for a father figure—for instance, dating musicians, some ``hand-picked'' by her father, all with forceful, dominating personalities like his. Her complaints against Fiedler päre seem valid, but the dysfunctional Fiedler family nevertheless strikes the reader as having been more typical of the mid-century upper middle class than traumatic in the ``Daddy Dearest'' vein. More intriguing sections of her book narrate her family's singular accomplishments: her grandfather's emigration from Austria to join the Boston Symphony, her father's navigation of the tides of cultural politics and of nationalist sentiment during WW I, and his endeavors to prove his mettle as a serious artist. That he loved dogs, fire engines, and women while hating children is, in the end, relatively uninteresting. Only Fiedler enthusiasts and habituÇs of the classical music scene will want to wade through the run-of-the-mill pop psychologizing featured here.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42391-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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