A nimble and discerning biography of an aristocratic adventurer who wrote one of the finest books on polar exploration.
Considering the adoration in which he is held in polar circles, it comes as a shock to learn that Wheeler’s is the first biography of Cherry-Garrard. The explorer’s Worst Journey in the World, chronicling his three years in the Antarctic with Robert Falcon Scott, is routinely cited as a peerless example of adventure-writing. And Wheeler (Terra Incognita, not reviewed, etc.) does a remarkable job in coaxing from scant primary source materials a sense of the man, presenting a personality to go with Cherry-Garrard’s detached, ironic voice. He was privileged, as someone with a name like that must be, reared on great English estates with rooks and gardeners and manor houses old enough to have medieval architectural remnants. Though he was never comfortable with the swells and the bloods, he harbored a respect for tradition and ritual, and his “ambition, single-mindedness, and self-reliance” led him into the arms of Robert F. Scott and the push to the South Pole, with its disastrous consequences, for which Cherry-Garrard assumed his own share of the responsibility. Building on the reminiscences of Cherry-Garrard’s widow, Wheeler fashions a convincing portrait of a man who rued the changes in the pastoral landscape and the position of the gentry and was deeply depressed by his many illnesses and the dreadful consequences of war, economic depression, then more war—all shaping a life that feels an extended exercise in “elegiac melancholy.” Though she doesn’t try to gloss the silences in the historic record, the author’s image of Cherry-Garrard isn’t fragmentary, but rather crazed, like an old mirror or the polar ice.
Wheeler has set a high standard for Cherry-Garrard biographies to come, as surely they will. (16-page photo insert)Pub Date: April 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50328-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Did you like this book?
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
