A judicious, sensitive account of an Antarctic trial by ice.
To Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth (1985) and Caroline Alexander’s The Endurance (1998), add this last stirring chapter in polar exploration’s Heroic Age.
In 1914, at the outset of WWI, Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the Antarctic interior. He personally led the first prong of the expedition, attacking the continent from the Weddell Sea; the saga of how Shackleton led all his men to safety after his ship was crushed in the pack ice is perhaps the most stunning success story in the annals of survival. Tyler-Lewis (History/Cambridge) tells the lesser-known tale of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition’s second prong, the Ross Sea Party, which actually accomplished its mission: to lay a 360-mile lifeline of supply depots on the other side of the continent, intended to sustain Shackleton on the final quarter of his crossing. Due to horribly inadequate planning, meager financing and atrocious conditions, three men died, and a relief party was needed to rescue the rest. Because all their efforts proved ultimately futile, the Ross Sea Party’s story seems destined for eternal second billing to Shackleton’s spectacular failure. But Tyler-Lewis manages to spin a breathtaking yarn of survival and achievement under the most extreme conditions. Her adroit chronicle draws on a splendid assembly of raw materials: public records, private papers, journals, logs and letters. Insightful portraits of the leading actors explain how their individual strengths and weaknesses affected the fate of the expedition every bit as much as the unforgiving Antarctic environment. The survivors returned to a world transformed by the Great War. Gone, too, was the romance of polar exploration, killed by technological advances and the diminished appetite for pointless sacrifice. The expedition’s ethos seems distant now, though the last surviving member of the Ross Sea Party died in only 1978.
A judicious, sensitive account of an Antarctic trial by ice.Pub Date: April 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03412-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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
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