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3.27 AVERAGE
3.27 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
This book was pretty good. I love anything to do with Everest so I found the story excellent but the writing was just ok.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
This book really makes you stop and think. It is about Beck's journey both before and after the tragic incident in '96. It's not just his story either but that of his family and friends.
The first 100 pages of this memoir are a detailed account of Weathers' journey up and down Everest and prove quite engaging. From there on, we jump back to his childhood and learn more about his marriage and family. While there are more accounts of mountain climbing later on, the pacing and focus of this book doesn't seem well honed. I do enjoy the narrative style as written and did not have a hard time speeding through this book.
I actually really enjoyed the setup of this book, beginning and ending with his experience on Everest. I think learning about his family dynamic was important to his story because it was such a huge part of his survival on Everest. Overall, the book kept me hooked.
the 1996 Everest accounts continue. I enjoyed this one more than I thought I would. Sure, a lot of this isn't actually about Everest, but those parts of fairly easy to skim / skip over. What I enjoyed about this is seeing what happened after Beck's Everest experience, as he deals with his health and repairing strained family relationships.
I cared way more about Beck's marriage than I thought I would going into this, and I loved that they were able to work in her perspective (and their children's perspective) by having them write sections in response to Beck's story.
Beck's account is very well written and so personal. It's very reflective about why mountain climbing was important in his life and doesn't discount the benefits of climbing in his life while also showing how it strained many relationships in his life and, of course, almost killed him. Beck's discussion of his mental health is raw and personal, if a little off putting when he describes therapy and psychiatry as "mumbo jumbo."
The actual Everest account benefited from the few years Beck waited to write about this. He avoids the Krakauer / Boukreev drama well, even when there is an obvious opportunity to be critical about why Boukreev rescued his clients but left Beck and Yasuko (apparently Boukreev offered conflicting reasons in various interviews).
I cared way more about Beck's marriage than I thought I would going into this, and I loved that they were able to work in her perspective (and their children's perspective) by having them write sections in response to Beck's story.
Beck's account is very well written and so personal. It's very reflective about why mountain climbing was important in his life and doesn't discount the benefits of climbing in his life while also showing how it strained many relationships in his life and, of course, almost killed him. Beck's discussion of his mental health is raw and personal, if a little off putting when he describes therapy and psychiatry as "mumbo jumbo."
The actual Everest account benefited from the few years Beck waited to write about this. He avoids the Krakauer / Boukreev drama well, even when there is an obvious opportunity to be critical about why Boukreev rescued his clients but left Beck and Yasuko (apparently Boukreev offered conflicting reasons in various interviews).
After reading Into Thin Air I wanted to read more about this tragedy. In one of the few epilogues in that book, Jon mentions Beck's book so I thought that I'd look it up. I got it last week and when I began the book it sucked me in. It was not quite as captivating as Into Thin Air but I think that is because he didn't focus on the tragedy much at all. He skimmed over it and then goes on to tell the readers how he got there (on Everest) and about his life in general. Even without the minute-by-minute detail (he states in the epilogue that he didn't do this because he felt the other books on the subject covered it enough) it is still a fascinating book and what Beck Weathers comes back from is still quite amazing. A definite must-read for the reader whom likes real-life drama.
After reading The Climb I was happy that this book was much easier to read. Simple, fun, yet talks about serious subjects. I had kind of counted on though, since the wording of the title, of more mountains.