A few too many rock faces, but still an appealing blend of climbing drama and personal candor. (b&w photos throughout)
In an unvarnished debut, Hill shares climbing experiences, offers technical tips, and portrays her emotional ties to other elite climbers.
As a 14-year-old California girl, Hill discovered rock climbing in 1975, when she tagged along with her sister's crew to Joshua Tree National Park. Small, but strong and flexible from gymnastics, she quickly fell in with J-Tree's top climbers; nicknamed “Little Herc,” she honed her skills on huge boulders named EBGB's and Trespassers Will Be Violated, while members of the wild bunch climbed naked at night or with a noose around the neck. Hill developed world-class abilities at the climbing citadel of Yosemite National Park, where she made repeated ascents of the famous walls El Capitan and Half Dome. Her portrait of Yosemite's talented climbers skillfully juxtaposes their artistry in the air with their freeloading creepiness on the ground; shoplifting and consumption of tourist leftovers were regular practices, and when a marijuana-laden plane crashed in the Sierras, the fit climbers became competitive entrepreneurs. Hill confined her energies to legal games, beginning with Survival of the Fittest, a televised four-event competition that she won four years in a row. By the mid-1980s, she was winning most of the European sport-climbing competitions despite French attempts to rewrite the rules to benefit national favorite Catherine Destivelle. On the flip side of Hill's career success is an abundance of personal heartache. Chuck Bludworth, who introduced her to climbing, died on a dramatic ascent of Argentina’s 23,000-foot Mt. Aconcaqua. High falls and avalanches kill other good friends. A romantic relationship with John Long goes nowhere slowly, and Hill's marriage to climber/businessman Russ Raffa, made without adequate thought, fails quickly, though a wedding picture of the couple hanging in harnesses from a cliff did make Bride’s magazine.
A few too many rock faces, but still an appealing blend of climbing drama and personal candor. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04981-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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