Essential reading for mountaineers, both actual and armchair.
A journey to the top of the world and the soul of a family.
Norgay, climbing leader of David Breashears’s IMAX expedition, shares both his story of adventure and an intimate portrait of his search for his father, Tenzing Norgay. The elder Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, and the emotional core of the story concerns the author’s construction of a connection with his deceased father by recreating his historic achievement. The family elements don’t stand in the way of the genuine adventure of Norgay’s account, however, as the drama unfolds on the deadly terrain of Everest, where a sudden storm or a slight slip-up can easily result in many deaths. (The terrain is gruesomely littered with the frozen corpses of men who had tried and failed to make the ascent with previous expeditions, and some of them were very close to the author’s own camps.) Norgay and coauthor Coburn cover the logistical details of summiting Everest with welcome precision and a clarity that opens the story to a much wider audience than merely the crampon-clad mountaineering herd. Indeed, by weaving the seemingly disparate elements of the IMAX expedition with personal elements of his own life and history, the author’s tale escapes easy generic classification. Whether describing the bouts of edema that afflict the climbers, answering age-old questions about the ways one attends to certain bodily functions atop a mountain, or hinting ever so slightly that his father beat Hillary to the top by a step or two, Norgay’s narrative achieves a deft balance between adventure story and family memoir. Breashears’s IMAX movie combined majestic shots with a gripping story of adventure, foolhardiness, and drive; this is a companion piece fully worthy of the events that inspired it.
Essential reading for mountaineers, both actual and armchair.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-251687-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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