A highflying, electrifying story of a treacherous sport in which every triumph is an eye blink away from becoming a disaster.
The breathtaking highs and life-threatening plunges of the most extreme stuntmen on Earth.
Keep your mixed martial arts, parcours and BMX bikes; you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen the point-of-view video of these free-flying pilots soaring in their homemade wingsuits over some of the most extreme terrain on the planet. In this riveting journalistic account, freelance writer Higgins chronicles the evolution of the sport from simple parachuting to BASE jumping (the acronym stands for building, antennae, span and Earth, which serve as launch points) to the development of these soaring, superherolike armored flight suits. The book is full of colorful characters but largely focuses on the contrasts between two of the most charismatic pilots, both of whom seek the holy grail of the sport: to land without using a parachute. The most famous is Jeb Corliss Jr., an adrenaline junkie who is most famous for a spectacular 2013 jump off China’s Mount Jianglang, popularized in a startling online video called “Grinding the Crack.” Despite being backed by multimillion-dollar sponsors, Corliss can’t seem to avoid trouble—e.g., being imprisoned for a spoiled jump off the Empire State Building in 2006 or carving a good chunk of his leg off during a 2012 flight in South Africa. Corliss’ counterpart is Gary Connery, the do-it-yourself British stuntman who famously doubled for the queen during the James Bond stunt at the 2012 Olympics. This is thrilling reporting, but Higgins responsibly never avoids the fatal risks involved, and neither do the pilots. A graphic account of the death of Corliss’ best friend, Dwain Weston, who slammed into Colorado’s Royal Gorge Bridge at 120 mph, punctuates the inherent danger. For anyone who finds these kinds of emotional and precise accounts of risk, ambition and victory irresistible, this is a must-read.
A highflying, electrifying story of a treacherous sport in which every triumph is an eye blink away from becoming a disaster.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-465-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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