A captivating, rousing adventure story.
The dramatic saga of the race between nations to climb the planet’s highest mountains.
In his latest, Ellsworth (African American History, Southern Literature/Univ. of Michigan; The Secret Game: A Basketball Story in Black and White, 2015, etc.) focuses on the 1930s and the men and women who risked their lives to climb the “deadliest mountains on Earth.” In vivid, novelistic prose, the author describes the significant expeditions and delivers engaging portraits of climbers from many different countries and their invaluable Sherpas. In 1931, the Germans stunned the British and their famous Alpine Club when an expedition led by former soldier Paul Bauer nearly reached the summit of Kangchenjunga, thought to be the world’s second-highest mountain, before being forced down by illness and bad weather. The British responded with a 1933 expedition to Everest. Equipped with newly designed boots, suits, and a new type of glacier glasses, Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton were hopeful but still failed. The Americans, with their Explorer’s Club, entered the race when Terris Moore and Dick Burdsall reached the summit of Minya Konka. In 1934, a German team failed to climb Nanga Parbat; four Germans and six Sherpas died. Inspired by James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, the British were the first to reach their Shangri-La, Nanda Devi’s pristine, massive, circular amphitheater, the Sanctuary. Maurice Wilson, who fought on the Western Front during World War I, flew from England to India and then crossed the Tibetan border to take on Mount Everest. He perished. In 1937, a German team took on Nanga Parbat a second time without success. In 1950, a French team led by Resistance fighter and mountaineer Maurice Herzog climbed Annapurna. Finally, as Ellsworth recounts triumphantly, on May 29, 1953, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, shook hands on Everest’s summit.
A captivating, rousing adventure story.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-43486-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
At a time when a whirlwind has demolished the Soviet Union, a musty smell of old academic disputes pervades these essays and lectures by a veteran Sovietologist. Lewin (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Gorbachev Phenomenon, 1988, etc.) seeks to describe the changes that transformed Russia from a rural to an urban country, and in particular to account for the rise of the bureaucratic state, which achieved its apogee after Stalin's death. He has many useful insights: He believes that, just as Hitler's worldview was shaped by his experiences in the First World War, so Stalin's view of state coercion as the secret of success—with its use of mobilization, propaganda, military might, and terror—was derived from the Civil War period. He believes that the Civil War dealt ``a severe blow to the libertarian aspirations of the makers of the 1917 revolutions,'' although recent discoveries in Moscow's archives seem to show that Lenin was prepared to use the most draconian methods right from the start. Lewin's insights are diminished by his repeated claim that what happened in the Soviet Union was neither ``socialism,'' nor ``communism,'' nor ``Marxism'' and by his insistence that what happened in other communist countries doesn't really fit such a description either. Throughout, Lewin seems hesitant to call things by their proper names. We read of Stalin's ``whimsical despotism'' and of the ``regrettable loss'' of the pre-revolutionary leadership. Most disappointing is his failure to explore the reasons for what he declines to call the fall of communism. It would have been useful to have had more insight into why the system died ``from natural causes.'' A pity that, with a brand-new car more or less on the road, Lewin has been content to tinker with the old model.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-123-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
A rare woman in male-dominated waters, Page, editor of The American Fly Fisher, is more interested in ``the light on the water'' than on the size of fish, in ``inspiration, not data.'' Although she was a latecomer to the fishing mania, Page's essays show that her eventual infection was inevitable, given her family heritage and her marriage to Tom Rosenbauer (The Orvis Fly- Fishing Guide, not reviewed). The granddaughter of Sparse Grey Hackle (a.k.a. Alfred Waterbury Miller), who wrote Fishless Days, Angling Nights (1971), she grew up around fishing but, unlike the boys, was not encouraged to participate. The family passion did, though, land her a job with Nick Lyons's New York publishing firm, whose daily concerns focused on angling (Lyons provides this volume's foreword). In 1984, promised a canoe ride in Vermont by Rosenbauer, Page finally tried her hand at casting and became hooked. Her first casts, she writes, ``are better forgotten,'' but she vividly, if minimalistically, recalls her first trout: ``A silvery little fish, and it was wee.'' These essays find Page fishing in Vermont's Battenkill River, off a small island near Cape Cod, and in Montana, where she's astonished to find trout in the Missouri River ``in grouped pods...like a herd of porpoises leaping against the current.'' But it's the little rivers—``the jewels of the outdoor experiments''—that most capture Page's fancy. She writes of trying to balance her career, marriage, and motherhood (she and Rosenbauer named their daughter Brooke) with a lust for wild trout. In one funny scene, a pencil-less Page, suddenly struck by literary inspiration, must negotiate a field of cow flops and electrified fences while wearing wet, sagging jeans. Deftly shifting gears in the same essay, she recounts her mother's slow death. Page adds a touch of light poetry to a genre little known for graceful writing. (12 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-367-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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