Nail-biting mountaineering wins out over soap-operatics in this absorbing tale of a woman conquering internal and external mountains. On September 29, 1988, Allison became the first American woman to stand at the peak of Mt. Everest. But her training began decades earlier, when she tried rock climbing in Utah's Zion National Park (``everything I learned electrified me'') and was instantly hooked. Here, with the help of Carlin (Brave New Bride, 1992 paperback), she grippingly describes her subsequent apprenticeship for Everest, with arduous steppingstones in Yosemite, Mt. McKinley, Pik Kommuninizma in Russia, and Ama Dablan in the Himalayas. The terrors pile up—blizzards, avalanches, dead companions—but the exhilaration of the ascent never fades. ``Climbing is how I express myself,'' Allison declares, and indeed she finds meaning largely through upward movement, confessing that if forced to choose between husband and Everest, she would head for the hills. Nonetheless, she values her love relations and relays them in schoolgirl detail: ``We lay there on our backs, talking about the stars....I was thinking: He's going to kiss me.'' The aim of this awkward dear-diary stuff seems to be to link true romance (which Allison finds with second husband David; her first turns out to be a wife-beater) and the attainment of mountain summits. No matter- -the action on the slope is what counts, and once up—especially above 19,000 feet, in the ``Death Zone''—Allison's account of mountaineering is as gritty as any. When she stands atop Everest and declares, ``I was wide open now, and I was aware of everything....I was standing on the top, looking down at the world,'' readers will join in her gusto. Allison plans a summer 1993 assault on the world's most treacherous peak, K2; this memoir, despite its unnecessary soapiness, will find its own place in that small pile of really first-rate mountaineering books. (Twenty-five b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-03468-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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