Getting lost in the white of a peak to find yourself; getting lost in the crowd to understand it and change it from within: after all, mountaineering and politics are superimposable experiences, full of courage, hope and future. To tell it is the book We will explore the stars. Bob Kennedy and Jim Whittaker from the Yukon glaciers in the 1968 election, written by Eleonora Recalcati, screenwriter, ghostwriter and editorial consultant.
On the slopes of Mount Kennedy
This little gem of writing and peaks was needed to relive a friendship, that between the Democratic senator and the first American to conquer Everest in May 1963, which begins on the slopes of Mount Kennedy. Deep Canada, Yukon region: Bob, with a consortium of seven mountaineers, even without specific training but had the breath of a match touch football with his children in the park of the Hickory Hill estate, he reaches the summit at 4,500 meters where no one has ever set foot. Jim is safe driving, but up there in blinding white Bob is alone. It is the company with which he elaborates the shooting in Dallas, a watershed in history, not only in America. After that March ’65, Bob has the strength to resume living and dreaming of a better America where “” A lot is little, and a little is a lot, that’s what politics that makes you so disgusting takes care of “, he smiles, turning to Jim. ” And that same dream, after more than half a century, also has a place in the heart of darkness of our disillusioned, violent and racist times.
Towards the 1968 presidential elections
Bob himself remembers it with a poem by Albert Camus: «In the midst of hatred / I discovered that there was in me / an invincible love. /… I finally understood that in the middle of winter, / I discovered that there was / an invincible summer in me ». And in those years swollen with blood and demonstrations, the empathy between Bob and Jim grows and is the force that gives life to the battles for human, social and economic rights: “All that fire in Vietnam burns us too, even our past , also John. We are in another era, or we change, or it is the end ». The yearning is that, to change in order not to die and Bob Kennedy runs for the Democratic Primary that will lead to the 1968 Presidential elections. Jim follows him and supports him, like all his family.
The senator yearns for the possibility of a better world, as he yearned for the beauty of white: denounces the injustices of an America black&white, has the courage to face an angry mob in Indianapolis just hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King. He is alone, exposed, fragile. Yet, he has an entire country with him that extends his hands and hopes to him. He has the courage to go towards history to change it, to go towards those shots of June 1968. Because, as Alfred Tennyson writes inUlysses (1833): «Come on, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world“. It was his dream, it is the dream of every man and woman.
We will explore the stars, Eleonora Recalcati, Ulrico Hoepli, pp. 164, € 19.90