Routine account of a groundbreaking expedition in the Great White Waste. Steger, who conquered the North Pole by dog sled a few years ago (North to the Pole, 1989), and Bowermaster (coauthor with Steger of Saving the Earth, 1990) try hard to make their tale of the 1989 Trans-Antarctica Expedition a gripper. The superlatives roll out: the first crossing of Antarctica by dog sled and ski, battling windchills of minus-65 degrees and 100-mile-per-hour winds, crossing the terrifying ``Zone of Inaccessibility,'' and so on. But despite these thrills, the story slogs along. The problem may lie in the expedition itself, which was masterfully organized and proceeded without major mishaps. A safe expedition makes a slow read. The six-man international crew (French, American, British, Russian, Chinese, Japanese) did its job with just the usual bickering frostbite. A man missing overnight, a dog stuck in a crevasse—such is the adventure for the armchair explorer, who winds up mulling over the explorers' menu (lots of Land O' Lakes cheese) and methods of garbage disposal (bag it up, fly it out). The US, which routinely cold-shoulders free-lance explorers arriving at its South Pole base, comes off as the heavy. It snows a lot. Everyone gets home safely. Indispensable for Antarctica buffs, but for real chilly thrills, try Shackleton or Scott. (Eight pages of color photographs and ten maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58714-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
