Best of 2011 Countdown: #22

Gianna:

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business
Dick Van Dyke
Crown

Last year Carol Burnett’s book This Time Together made my year end list, so I guess it's no surprise that Dick Van Dyke's really sweet memoir My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business has made my 2011 list.

If Dick Van Dyke had only done one thing in his career, and if that one thing was The Dick Van Dyke Show…well, he would still be an icon. That’s right, no Mary Poppins, no Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Liz’s heart just sank at the mere thought of that!). Without Dick Van Dyke (and of course Carl Reiner, who wrote the foreword to My Lucky Life), there would be no television. Okay, so that is an overstatement, but there wouldn’t have been Mary Tyler Moore, or Rhoda, or All in the Family, or God help us all, no Newhart! [I've never seen any of these shows. How old is Gianna?  Sheesh!] I know, scary right? [Obviously not for me....] All I have done since 1970 is watch television, so trust me, I’ve considered this often.

Anyway, Dick Van Dyke is a trailblazer of the highest order, but this is far from just a career memoir; he writes about his childhood (great bit about his mother trying to sell him a bill of goods about how he was born prematurely, but it turns out she moved his birth date because she got pregnant before she was married – his grandmother sells her out), his marriage, his children and his thirty-plus year relationship with Michelle Triola Marvin who died in 2009. [He's single?  I do love Mary Poppins....]

What I love about this memoir, as well as Carol Burnett’s book, is that it captures a time in Hollywood, and certainly a type of actor (the singer/dancer/comedian) that is so incredibly rare these days (not to mention their amazing grace and class). 

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

Wade Davis

Knopf

I'm a mountain person, despite my Houston address.  Some people are recharged by the rhythmic thrashing of ocean waves, but I find sanctuary surrounded by mountains, tall trees, Stellar's Jays darting among branches of evergreens.  If I disappear, (don't) look for me in places like Yosemite and Mount Rainier.  I also find mountain stories captivating, even if I don't really possess the courage or desire to summit peaks myself.  Because of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, there's an entire reading generation enthralled by Mount Everest, a passion that has spread to documentaries and TV shows (if you haven't read Into Thin Air, you must, or listen to the outstanding audiobook version).  One of my college majors was history, too.  And one of my favorite novels is Mrs. Dalloway, in part because of the World War I veteran Septimus.  These interests converge for me into Wade Davis's outstanding tome, Into the Silence.

George Mallory

Davis, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, manages to spin gold from the history of the early expeditions of Mount Everest, and this book should be on every holiday wish list for non-fiction readers.  The larger-than-life George Mallory was a British soldier in World War I, surviving in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme.  He saw horrific things, the birth of modern warfare and inhumanity.  The British Empire, like the surviving soldiers coming home from war (one million died in the war), faced a crisis of identity.  No longer was Britain the impregnable force of global domination.  The soldier and the nation were shell-shocked.  They turned East to the Himalayas and if the nation couldn't rule the civilized world, it could conquer the natural one.  

Mallory, fearless, charismatic, probably pretty annoying in camp, and fellow Britons set off to climb Everest in a series of expeditions in the 1920's.  On the mountain these men faced their war demons and looked to lift their country back to global prominence.  Mallory wrote home often and the expeditions were a source of national pride (even if the native Tibetans found them confounding; why climb a mountain?), and they were scaling the side of the world's tallest mountain without the benefit of modern equipment.  One aspect of Krakauer's book on Everest is that it particularly captures the incredible danger of Everest, and it takes place 70 years after the Mallory expeditions.  

Mallory, of course, never returned.  The mythology suggests that he was last seen making a fearless assault on the summit before disappearing into a cloud.  Did he make it to the top, or was New Zealander Edmund Hillary really the first to summit the mountain?  Into the Silence is the story of a mountaineer and a story of a nation in crisis, a worthy addition to the great history books that make the 20th Century, at least for me, the most engrossing 100 years on record.  While there are other books about Mallory and about World War I, I think that the way that Davis blends together his story is something special.

30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 10

Day 10: Let the wild rumpus start!  Our favorite adventure books!

Gianna, who decided to pick every single book ever shelved in that section because she knows that I always list her selection first and now I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to write about:

I really think a person could have a normal life if the only education s/he ever received was gleaned from adventure books. I really think you would be okay. [No you would not.  You'd die at a Target during December.] They pretty much cover everything. Plus you would be a huge hit at parties with tales of dismemberment, cannibalism, and lots of death. [So that's why people love me--the dismemberment!]Personally after I read a good adventure book, I wont shut up about it.

The last really good adventure book I got my hands on was Blind Descent by James Tabor. This book follows two premier cave diving teams as they race to find the deepest cave. It is absolutely captivating and frankly I still can’t stop talking about it. [That is true.  Ask her about the roaches.] Cave exploring is oh so dangerous and scary and gross. For reals gross, not icky gross. There are so many ways to die cave exploring – none of them pretty--but let's just say if I had to choose I would hope to get electrocuted because that sounds like the fastest. Also please note that starvation is among the ways to die, which means your ass either got lost or stuck. Literally stuck.

A few of my other favorite adventure books:

Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley. I don’t know who recommended this book to me, but it was several years ago but I actually just came across it last year. I get it now, it really is fantastic and fun. [Richard Bausch wrote a great novel about Mary Kingsley called Hello to the Cannibals, which was my introduction to Mary Kingsley.  She's a bad ass.  Love her.]

Those of you who know me will agree that if there is a story of cannibalism, possible cannibalism or even hinted of cannibalism….I am sold. Alive by Piers Paul Read is a classic in this genre. It is the story of an airplane crash in the Chilean Andes in 1972. The plane was carrying the Uruguayan rugby team; 16 survived the crash and the 2 and a half months in the mountains….guess what they ate? [Andean Mountain chicken?] If you haven’t read adventure this book is a really great first read. [Also works as a cookbook.]

I don’t know if this is really considered an adventure book but I think it is and I never really get to make decisions like this, so for today, at least, Out of Africa makes this list. Anyone who is a lover of the written word should read this – it is beautiful. And you know what…that movie ain’t too bad to look at either. [Mmmm....Robert Redford in safari gear.....]

My favorite adventure book was actually an easy pick for me. It has everything that an adventure book should have. History, drama, death, thrills, more death, danger, near death, great writing and then a dude that gets mistaken as dead which is like a cherry on top. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is just stunning. This book chronicles a climbing season in 1996 when 12 people died attempting to climb Everest. There is so much packed into this book that I don’t even know where to begin but I will say this; I read this book over a decade ago, and I truly still think about it all the time. I think about how some wealthy people have an outrageous sense of entitlement, I think about the poor Sherpas who have to save, clean up after, and risk their own lives because of these fricken yahoos. When you look at photographs of Everest and see how polluted it is, well, it's just sickening. Krakauer manages to get so much into this book, you may just feel like you climb a bit of Everest yourself. [I agree--one of the best books I've ever read, and the audio version is terrific too.]

Some other favorite climbing books are:

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. This is a book about two climbers--Joe the author, and Simon. They were descending a mountain alpine style (tied together) when Simon fell and broke his leg, this led to many horrible things and at one point Simon was hanging off a cliff and Joe was on top trying to pull him back up… but the snow beneath was starting to give – Joe had to make a decision in order to survive – he cut the rope. Bye bye buddy. Joe made it back to base camp then home. Oh, it took many days but guess what? Yea, Simon made it back to camp too…he survived falling into a crevasse and walked, hopped, crawled several miles to camp with a broken leg. How awkward was that for Joe when he gets a call that his bestie survived? Pretty awkward. [This story was also made into a great documentary.]

K2: The Savage Mountain by Charles Houston and Robert Bates. K2 is not as high as Everest but more difficult. I think it has a higher body count.

K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain and No Shortcuts to the Top both by Ed Viesters (who by the way was at Everest in 1996 - he saved several people).

Maybe it's not even adventure that I like, but just a high body count?

Liz:

I used to run when I played basketball in high school, but there was a point to that: the complete humiliation of short girls who had no business being within twenty feet of the basket.  There is no better fully-clothed thrill than smacking a basketball into the face of some 5'3" point guard and then cackling like a lunatic.  That is pure bliss.  My point, though, is that I need a focus in order to run.  On the other hand, there are loonies who run for fun...and run....and run..... Ultra-marathoners are insane, but the book about them, Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, is terrific.  The intrepid author explores the characters who enjoy running a hundred miles in a weekend, and he chronicles the greatest long distance race ever, through the Copper Canyons in Mexico.  I love this book.

On a different note, there's a little travel narrative that has been stuck in my head for a decade, a book I think about perhaps too often.  A.L. Kennedy is one of those super-talented writers that not enough people read, particularly in the US.  She was given a magazine assignment to cover a bullfighting match in Spain.  What followed, though, was an exploration of Spanish culture and the ambiguities surrounding bullfighting as a sport.  Along with her exploration of the life-and-death battles in the ring, Kennedy takes her own internal journey, a moving rumination of on her struggle with depression.  On Bullfighting isn't a long book, but it's one that packs history, adventure, self-discovery, tragedy, and moral complexity into every single page.