An exhilarating slice of American adventure-sporting history.
A sweeping account of the first American visitors to Mount Everest’s peak.
Coburn (Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman, 2000, etc.) delivers an atmospheric retelling of that monumental inaugural climb in May 1963, providing a companion to his stunning 1997 pictorial, Everest: Mountain Without Mercy. In the early 1960s, there was great pressure on these brave “hybrid scientist-adventurers” to boost American morale with a daring feat of collective strength after such a dark decade shrouded in war, a failed Cuban territorial invasion and Soviet space rivalries. A chance meeting between Willi Unsoeld, a grizzly mountain guide, and young Pacific Northwest climbers Barry Corbet and Jake Breitenbach while scaling Wyoming’s Grand Teton range in the early ’60s forged the beginnings of an American Everest team of climbing parties led by Norman Dyhrenfurth, a veteran Swiss-American mountaineer. Eventually, 21 hand-selected members of the expedition (glaciologists, radio operators, historians, cinematographers, etc., along with numerous ancillaries) ascended the mountain’s treacherous terrain, battling bone-crushing injuries, oxygen deprivation, weather extremes and “house-sized” blocks of ice collapsing in their paths. Though Corbet’s faith in the team’s success floundered, the steely determination of the other members kept hope alive. Culled from “Expedition Newsletters” and interviews with the seven surviving expedition members, Coburn’s unhurried, character-driven narrative pays scrupulous attention to the climb’s every detail and to Everest’s majestic natural history. The author’s contemporary coda features a visit with the nonagenarian Dyhrenfurth, who wryly comments that mountaineering on Everest has gone terribly modern and that simply “coughing up $50,000” can afford a reasonably fit person a secure, guided trek to the summit.
An exhilarating slice of American adventure-sporting history.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88714-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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