Record-breaking long-distance swimmer Cox (Grayson, 2008, etc.) retraces Norwegian explorer’s Roald Amundsen's groundbreaking polar explorations.
Part personal memoir and part a recounting of earlier voyages of discovery, the book's release is timed to coincide with the centenary of the famous 1911 race to the South Pole when Amundsen beat the British standard-bearer Robert Scott's ill-fated party by less than a month. The author, who tested her endurance by swimming in subzero temperatures, reports her fascination with the pioneering efforts of Amundsen and his Norwegian predecessors. She sees a parallel between her own preparations to swim in extremely cold waters and their similar efforts to prepare to endure glacial conditions. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, a mentor to Amundsen, hoped to find the Northwest passage. He and his crew trained in Greenland, where they studied the survival skills of the local Inuit population. Though he failed, Amundsen followed in his footsteps and succeeded, and he intended to return to the Arctic but was thwarted by the beginning of World War I. After the war, he became involved with exploratory air flights to the North and South Poles. Cox writes about how she attempted to follow in their footsteps—swimming in Greenland's freezing waters—in order to explore “the inner and outer worlds of what a human being could achieve.” She weaves together her own experiences, including a flight to the South Pole, with those of the earlier explorers, and relates interesting anecdotes about the people who helped her on her quest. Entertaining, but readers may wish for more Amundsen and less Cox.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59340-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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