A worthy addition to the growing body of literature on adventures that test the limits of nature and mankind.
A fatality spurs an inquiry into an extreme sport, illuminating the risks—as well as the rewards—of free diving.
After writing a couple dozen guidebooks for the Lonely Planet series, Skolnick shows sharp reportorial instincts in this multilayered narrative beginning with the 2013 tragedy of Nicholas Mevoli, “the first athlete to die in an international freediving competition.” The obscure sport tests the limits of its athletes, who dive as deep as 100 meters or more, holding their breath for some four minutes, risking blackouts from the pressure or worse. “Their feats dazzled because with each dive they were risking their lives,” the author writes of one such competition. “No one knew where that unknown limit was.” Interspersed with an examination of the sport of free diving—loosely organized, self-governed, with most of the athletes spending considerable sums without sponsorship—is the story of an athlete considered remarkable well before his death and who lived his life with an uncompromising purity—though he always attracted romantic attention, he committed to celibacy for as long as four years—and who made it his priority “to live, not merely exist.” Parallel tracks show Mevoli’s life as he pushed himself toward an early death that quite possibly could have been prevented and the development of the sport as it gained the perspective of mortality that his death underscored. “Nick’s was the first fatality in more than 35,000 dives,” writes Skolnick. “Afterward, they were forced to admit that nobody could say for sure how repeated depths impacted the body….This wasn’t a matter of conflicting science; research was almost nonexistent.” This is a page-turning book about how and why Mevoli died (with a suggestion that a doctor shouldn’t have cleared him to dive), but it’s also about the competitors drawn to the sport, the ones for whom “freediving is both an athletic quest to push the limits of the body and mind, and a spiritual experience.”
A worthy addition to the growing body of literature on adventures that test the limits of nature and mankind.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44748-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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