Anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Davis (The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, 2009, etc.) exhaustively charts the first epic assaults on Mount Everest by determined Englishmen after the devastation of World War I.
Britain had resolved to be the first to scale the as-yet-unexplored reaches of the highest mountains in the world since the empire’s first surveying forays into India and Tibet in the mid 19th century. Then, the discovery of Everest’s actual height was first established and named after a geographer responsible for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of 1829, Sir George Everest. In this ambitious study, Davis eventually arrives at the first expedition of 1921, sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society but delayed by the war, which had traumatized and practically eliminated an entire generation of young people in England and Europe. For shell-shocked veterans, Everest signified “a sentinel in the sky, a place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad.” Enter George Mallory (1886–1924), a graduate of Cambridge, young husband and father, veteran and accomplished climber, who was chosen to head the first exploratory mission up the North Col in 1921, only to be driven back by the summer monsoon. The reconnaissance mission was followed by two others shortly after, organized again by the Alpine Club. The expedition of 1922 was filmed by John Noel and employed oxygen for the first time, controversially; it ended with the highest climb by George Finch but the death of seven Tibetan assistants in an avalanche. Yet again, in 1924, the familiar team attacked Everest, and with Mallory claiming he was “the strongest of the lot, the most likely to get to the top,” he set off with the much younger, inexperienced climber Sandy Irvine, and apparently fell to their deaths very near the summit on June 8 or 9. Davis explores every facet of these single-minded expeditions and the deeply committed, bold, hubristic men who made it possible. More detail-bludgeoning than riveting tale of mettle against mountain.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-40889-2
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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