A new love adds depth to this engaging story of personal growth.
The abrupt end to her marriage left climber and skydiver Davis (High Infatuation: A Climber's Guide to Love and Gravity, 2007) depressed and without a sense of purpose—but not for long.
For 12 years, the author writes, she and her husband led a life of “pure adventure and self-invention, and nothing about it was safe.” Traveling around the world, they challenged each other to various daredevil adventures, including difficult solo climbs without ropes. All this changed when her husband defied an unwritten rule against climbing a possibly fragile sandstone arch in a national park in Utah. He became the target of a media-fueled outcry. Under the threat of criminal proceedings, the pair lost the commercial sponsorship that had sustained their frugal existence, and he abandoned her and disappeared. Skydiving was the one experience she had been unwilling to share with her husband; after 20 years as a rock climber, a fear of falling was ingrained in her. Now, however, Davis was determined to engage in this new challenge. She provides a gripping account of how she overcame her fears and her delight as she mastered the skills needed to skydive. While the adrenaline rush from landing safely is part of the thrill, the intense mental focus necessary for making split-second decisions on opening her chute was also addictive. Overcoming her previous fears, she combined solo rock climbing with potentially dangerous jumps from rocky peaks but received a necessary lesson in caution when she lost control during a jump and was injured.
A new love adds depth to this engaging story of personal growth.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451652055
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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