A seaworthy effort. (b&w photos, illustrations)
Lively, encapsulated histories of a dozen or so adventurers, scientists, and eccentrics who experimented to discover ways to plumb the depths of the ocean, written by British scientist Trevor (Marine Biology/Univ. of Liverpool).
Nobody had ever gone skindiving before John Guy Gilpatric created the first diving mask out of an old pair of flying goggles. That was in the South of France late in the 1920s, but people had been upending bell jars to capture the air inside in order to dive—and breathe—since Aristotle. Later in the 20th century, the efforts to discover the secrets of the deep became more scientific. J.B.S. Haldane, who follows his distinguished father in Trevor's study, began as a demolitions expert, progressed to the serious study of blood chemistry in the water and in the sky, and finished by laying the foundations for human and population genetics. He probably deserves his own book. Each of these adventuresome, sometimes foolhardy men arrived at the bottom of the ocean by a different route—from a love of the sea, from a love of the air, from pure curiosity, or from the love of photography. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was seminal for most of them. Many tended to hurl themselves into the center of their experiments, some squashing themselves into leaky diving bells, others percolating their own blood for scientific ends. But what all Norton's subjects have in common is a battle against the pressure of deep water as they fought against the dark and the huge weight of an undersea atmosphere that tended to make eardrums perforate, bleed, and worse: "If the air supply was cut off," says Norton of some early divers who were over 150 feet down in primitive "hard hat" diving suits, "his entire body could be rammed up into the helmet, except for the soft bits which would shoot up the air hose."
A seaworthy effort. (b&w photos, illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7867-0750-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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