Adventure extremists everywhere will be grateful for this vivid depiction of a one-of-a-kind quest.
A seasoned trailblazer’s intrepid trek across the Arctic tundra.
After a 2,000-mile journey tracing the equator through the virgin jungles of Amazonia in 1999, South African-born Horn, quite the impatient, antisocial outdoorsman, set his sights even higher: tracking the expanse of the Arctic Circle in 2002-2003. Before his groundbreaking mission, the radical adventurer embarked on two preparatory apprenticeships. A trip across Greenland with two experienced Swiss explorers was cut short by an obligatory in-person acceptance of the Laureus World Sports Award for his equatorial expedition. A solo hike to the North Pole, supplemented with vital guidance from renowned Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland, proved to be a much more treacherous jaunt than imagined; Horn was rescued from the Russian tundra with three frostbitten fingers. Four months later, against doctor’s orders, the determined, obsessed wanderer headed toward the Arctic Circle, armed with experience and enhanced equipment. By foot, on skis or by kayak, he rushed through quaint villages, making friends and fond memories. Again he was at the mercy of harsh elements: ferocious winds, whiteout conditions, hungry polar bears, wolves and temperatures dipping to 98 degrees below zero. Horn’s raw, unfettered prose will hold readers in an apprehensive embrace as he describes risking life and limb to scale deadly frozen terrain.
Adventure extremists everywhere will be grateful for this vivid depiction of a one-of-a-kind quest.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36262-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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