Fans of mountaineering will find this a winner.
A thrills-and-chills—and occasional spills—view of the mad heroes of free climbing, scaling mountain faces without ropes.
You’d have to be out of your mind to head up the 3,000-foot-high cliff face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without equipment of modern mountaineering, the lightweight chocks and clips and ropes that keep a person from plummeting into the void. Yet, as mountain guide Synnott writes, building on his reporting for National Geographic, that out-of-mindness defines young Alex Honnold, “the world’s greatest free soloist,” who has developed the habit of sizing up some of the planet’s most formidable mountains and then scrambling up them without the benefit of equipment. Old-school climbers have looked at him with combined awe and despair, and, as the author writes, Honnold does have a talent for alienating potential allies: “He wore his ego right on his shirtsleeve like the logo of one of his sponsors.” Still, there’s no question he has bragging rights; in one of his well-publicized exploits, Honnold free soloed El Capitan, Half Dome, and Mount Watkins, all three of Yosemite’s big three rock faces, in less than 19 hours altogether. “This monster linkup entailed 7,000 vertical feet of difficult rock climbing,” writes Synnott, “seventy-seven pitches up to 5.13a.” If the last clause contains numbers that aren’t immediately meaningful to you, no worries: One of the great virtues of this book is the author’s cleareyed explanations of how alpinists parse mountains, rating them for difficulty and then doing the calculus of who qualifies as the world’s leading climber on the strength of those numbers. Old-timers agree: Honnold may be ill-mannered and self-absorbed, but he’s got the right stuff, doing what previous generations of climbers deemed impossible. As for lessons for would-be climbers, Synnott offers the cardinal one in the voice of one of the old-timers: “Don’t fall.”
Fans of mountaineering will find this a winner.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-98664-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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