A well-written, compelling read begging for a warm fireside and a hot cup of cocoa.
Polar explorer Jarvis (Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica, 2008, etc.) takes on the re-creation of one of the most difficult treks imaginable.
Trying to “double” Ernest Shackleton’s (1874–1922) desperate trip 800 nautical miles across the Southern Ocean in a 23-foot boat followed by a 35 kilometer trek across South Georgia’s heavily glaciated mountains requires a tight team with a strong leader. Shackleton had no choice as he altered his planned adventure of crossing Antarctica on foot from the Weddell Sea coast to the Ross Sea. After his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the ice for more than a year, Shackleton set off in a reconfigured lifeboat with five men in search of rescue. It was the greatest survival journey of all time. After he was “asked by Shackleton’s granddaughter to undertake this journey and was inspired to want to do it as the greatest survival story of the heroic era of exploration,” the author’s attempt to repeat this desperate journey began with finding sponsors, which took three years. The author was lucky in finding TV sponsors, although the trek was limited by filming requirements. They also had to travel three months before the period Shackleton’s crew did due to permit requirements. The story of their journey is bone-chilling at the least and breathtakingly frightening. There are certain elements that will confuse nonsailors and nonclimbers, particularly terms never explained—e.g., katabatic winds, nunatak and bergschrund. The author’s description of icy seas soaking the crew as they tried to sleep like sardines in the hold is not reading for the claustrophobic. Surely it was difficult enough to attempt this voyage, but as they accomplished it without modern (waterproof) clothing or navigational aids, it was a most remarkable feat.
A well-written, compelling read begging for a warm fireside and a hot cup of cocoa.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228273-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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 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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