Some books I've been reading
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer
If you only read one book about mountaineering, it should be Andy Kirkpatrick's Psychovertical, the story of how his impostor syndrome led him to attempt ever-more desperate routes on sun-baked and/or ice-clad mountains all around the world, often climbing solo (so he knew he wasn't taking credit for his partner's skill); of the terrible strain this placed on his marriage and his family life; and of how he eventually made a semblance of peace with his demons high on Yosemite's super-hard Reticent Wall.
If you can stretch to two books, though, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air would be an excellent choice for the second.
Krakauer, an outdoor journalist and seasoned mountaineer with a string of difficult ascents to his credit, was contacted in early 1995 by Outside magazine, asking if he'd go to Everest Base Camp to cover the then-new phenomenon of commercial guided expeditions on the world's highest mountain. The assignment awakened his long-suppressed childhood dreams, and he asked if he could go the next year instead, so he'd have time to train properly and go to the summit. With expedition places being sold at up to $65,000 (plus airfare to Nepal) it was a big ask, but his editor felt the story was important enough to work something out, and after cutting a deal with guide Rob Hall's company Adventure Consultants for free advertising space, Krakauer's place was granted.
Unfortunately for him, this put him square in the middle of the 1996 Everest disaster. In brief: due to a combination of overcrowding, personal rivalries between members of different teams, and the inexperience of many clients, most expedition members didn't summit by their agreed turnaround times; bravado (for the clients) and commercial pressures (for the guides) drove them on anyway. It didn't help, of course, that poor decision-making and self-awareness are common effects of hypoxia. So lots of people ended up trying to come down the mountain - a difficult routefinding exercise - in the dark.
Then the storm hit.
It's a complex story, and I won't attempt to summarise it further; suffice it to say that many people died, and many more would have died without the heroism chronicled in Krakauer's book. Which, as previously intimated, is excellent: Krakauer's account was criticised by other people on the mountain (especially by guide Anatali Boukreev, of whom Krakauer was very critical) but he does an excellent job of integrating many conflicting accounts into a coherent story, using his personal narrative as an anchor. I also loved Randy Rackliff's eerie, pain-filled woodcuts, one of which graced each chapter.
The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf
I was recommended this by steerpikelet, and really tried to like it. I think the central idea of the book (AIUI, that society's insistence on female beauty acts as a tax on women's time, money and energy that counteracts many of the gains made by second-wave feminism) is almost certainly true, and if true, important. But the book went back to the library only one-third read (and with a hefty fine to pay). There were two things that really annoyed me about this book (or at least the part I read):
The book also left me in much greater sympathy with the womanism movement; if The Beauty Myth is typical of feminist writing, I can see how women who aren't white, Western and middle-class would decide the movement has no relevance to their lives.
Oh, and I hated the turgid, ostentatious style.
At its best (for instance, the bit where she talks about case law allowing employers to dismiss women for failing to meet dress standards higher than those imposed on men; not coincidentally, one of the few well-referenced parts of the book) The Beauty Myth is devastating. Overall, though, I think the premise deserved a much better treatment.
A Song of Stone, by Iain Banks
I'm about a hundred pages into this, and so far I'm really not enjoying it - and normally Banks is one of my favourite writers. Mostly I just can't stand the narrator. Wikipedia tells me that this is deliberate, but it's really detracting from my enjoyment.
Also, as a rule, childless women don't express milk when sexually aroused. Jesus Christ, Iain.
No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 by Graham Bowley
An account of the 2008 K2 disaster, this book had many uncanny resonances with Krakauer's. There are differences: Krakauer's teammates were mostly highly driven type-A CEOs and doctors, using their money to leapfrog the traditional slow mountaineering apprenticeship, whereas those involved in the 2008 K2 season all had some mountaineering experience under their belts (the Norwegian Rolf Bae had just come from the first repeat of a hard and dangerous big-wall aid line on the nearby Trango Tower). But again there was overcrowding, ropes being fixed too late and in the wrong place, unclear divisions of responsibilities leading to crucial gear being left behind, commercial pressure leading to poor decisionmaking, and turnaround times being ignored. The net effect was that the last few climbers didn't leave the summit until nearly 8pm, though everybody should have been heading down by the early afternoon.
Then the serac collapsed.
Then it collapsed again.
And again.
Climbers like to divide danger into subjective and objective danger: subjective danger is that which you can control through your skill and experience, and objective danger is that which can only be bypassed or rushed past, like rockfall or avalanche. Or, in this case, collapsing seracs - steep ice-cliffs formed by glaciers. The normal routes up K2 pass through a steep, narrow gully called the Bottleneck, which is overlooked by the huge, overhanging Balcony Serac - a situation that's a textbook example of "objective danger". Some climbers, seeing the rotten state of the Balcony Serac and the backed-up queues in the Bottleneck, abandoned their summit bid early in the day; others were less cautious. The lucky ones escaped with their lives.
Bowley's not a mountaineer, but he's clearly done his research: I spotted a couple of slight infelicities with terminology, but these could be excused as the result of dumbing-down for a non-expert audience. I was unsurprised to see Kurt Diemberger's name among the acknowledgements. Bowley wasn't on the mountain himself, so his narrative switches viewpoint more frequently than Krakauer's; this could be confusing, but Bowley carries it off fairly well. You'll probably need to bookmark the list of climbers at the beginning of the book, though.
The impression I took away from both books was that 8000er-bagging is a crazy game: maximum objective danger, suffering and risk, and minimal technical challenge. Bowley occasionally mentions the stunning, unexpected beauty of K2 and its surroundings, but Krakauer reports only emptiness: even with bottled oxygen, the hypoxia and drudgery sucked all the joy out of his time on the mountain. I mentioned my impressions on Twitter to the polar explorer Alex Hibbert, and he responded "Tourists use a handful of common routes, but independent attempts on 8000ers are still nails... and plenty of harder stuff elsewhere... there are still plenty of climbers quietly opening new routes and climbing out of season - mostly not on Everest at present." I think he's referring to climbs like the recent ten-day Alpine-style first ascent of the West Face of Vasuki Parbat in the Garwhal Himalaya. It's good to know that the high-cost, summit-focused, siege-style climbs of established lines described in Krakauer and Bowley's books aren't the only game in town.
Nurse on Call, by Edith Cotterill
I'd never heard of this book or this author when I picked it up from the display at the library, but it's unexpectedly great. It's Cotterill's tales of being a district nurse in the Black Country in the postwar years. Think James Herriot, but with fewer cows.
I do like it when a random book choice turns out so well.
If you only read one book about mountaineering, it should be Andy Kirkpatrick's Psychovertical, the story of how his impostor syndrome led him to attempt ever-more desperate routes on sun-baked and/or ice-clad mountains all around the world, often climbing solo (so he knew he wasn't taking credit for his partner's skill); of the terrible strain this placed on his marriage and his family life; and of how he eventually made a semblance of peace with his demons high on Yosemite's super-hard Reticent Wall.
If you can stretch to two books, though, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air would be an excellent choice for the second.
Krakauer, an outdoor journalist and seasoned mountaineer with a string of difficult ascents to his credit, was contacted in early 1995 by Outside magazine, asking if he'd go to Everest Base Camp to cover the then-new phenomenon of commercial guided expeditions on the world's highest mountain. The assignment awakened his long-suppressed childhood dreams, and he asked if he could go the next year instead, so he'd have time to train properly and go to the summit. With expedition places being sold at up to $65,000 (plus airfare to Nepal) it was a big ask, but his editor felt the story was important enough to work something out, and after cutting a deal with guide Rob Hall's company Adventure Consultants for free advertising space, Krakauer's place was granted.
Unfortunately for him, this put him square in the middle of the 1996 Everest disaster. In brief: due to a combination of overcrowding, personal rivalries between members of different teams, and the inexperience of many clients, most expedition members didn't summit by their agreed turnaround times; bravado (for the clients) and commercial pressures (for the guides) drove them on anyway. It didn't help, of course, that poor decision-making and self-awareness are common effects of hypoxia. So lots of people ended up trying to come down the mountain - a difficult routefinding exercise - in the dark.
Then the storm hit.
It's a complex story, and I won't attempt to summarise it further; suffice it to say that many people died, and many more would have died without the heroism chronicled in Krakauer's book. Which, as previously intimated, is excellent: Krakauer's account was criticised by other people on the mountain (especially by guide Anatali Boukreev, of whom Krakauer was very critical) but he does an excellent job of integrating many conflicting accounts into a coherent story, using his personal narrative as an anchor. I also loved Randy Rackliff's eerie, pain-filled woodcuts, one of which graced each chapter.
The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf
I was recommended this by steerpikelet, and really tried to like it. I think the central idea of the book (AIUI, that society's insistence on female beauty acts as a tax on women's time, money and energy that counteracts many of the gains made by second-wave feminism) is almost certainly true, and if true, important. But the book went back to the library only one-third read (and with a hefty fine to pay). There were two things that really annoyed me about this book (or at least the part I read):
- I kept wanting to stamp "[citation needed]" all over it - Wolf makes many surprising (to me, at least) factual claims, but the way her references are structured (in alphabetical order at the end, with no links from claims to references) makes it unnecessarily hard to find what her source is for any given claim. You might object that it's a popular book, not a scholarly paper - but plenty of popular books manage to provide useful references. The author of Derailing for Dummies might object that I shouldn't insist that a Marginalised Person follow the rules of a formalised academic game, but that would be ridiculous in this case: Wolf is an academic. In fact, she's a graduate of the same Oxford college as me. So her failure to abide by basic, minimal standards of scholarship pissed me right off.
- I'm pretty certain that there is no smoke-filled room full of aged white men plotting ways to keep women down. As amusing as it is to imagine a bunch of cigar-chomping CEOs crying "The Feminine Mystique has failed, chaps! What now?", the patriarchy is a prospiracy, not a conspiracy. Wolf, in her calmer moments, admits this; but then she goes right back to talking as if there is such a room. Hell, her epigraph asserts as much. This is a shame, because it's harder to fix problems if we don't understand how they arose in the first place. And if we defeat the Beauty Myth, there's probably going to be some other Bad Trend along to limit the gains made, and that's going to arise in much the same way as this one did. Our best hope of heading it off at the pass is to understand the mechanisms by which such backlashes arise, and clinging to the "smoke-filled room" narrative will only make that harder.
The book also left me in much greater sympathy with the womanism movement; if The Beauty Myth is typical of feminist writing, I can see how women who aren't white, Western and middle-class would decide the movement has no relevance to their lives.
Oh, and I hated the turgid, ostentatious style.
At its best (for instance, the bit where she talks about case law allowing employers to dismiss women for failing to meet dress standards higher than those imposed on men; not coincidentally, one of the few well-referenced parts of the book) The Beauty Myth is devastating. Overall, though, I think the premise deserved a much better treatment.
A Song of Stone, by Iain Banks
I'm about a hundred pages into this, and so far I'm really not enjoying it - and normally Banks is one of my favourite writers. Mostly I just can't stand the narrator. Wikipedia tells me that this is deliberate, but it's really detracting from my enjoyment.
Also, as a rule, childless women don't express milk when sexually aroused. Jesus Christ, Iain.
No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 by Graham Bowley
An account of the 2008 K2 disaster, this book had many uncanny resonances with Krakauer's. There are differences: Krakauer's teammates were mostly highly driven type-A CEOs and doctors, using their money to leapfrog the traditional slow mountaineering apprenticeship, whereas those involved in the 2008 K2 season all had some mountaineering experience under their belts (the Norwegian Rolf Bae had just come from the first repeat of a hard and dangerous big-wall aid line on the nearby Trango Tower). But again there was overcrowding, ropes being fixed too late and in the wrong place, unclear divisions of responsibilities leading to crucial gear being left behind, commercial pressure leading to poor decisionmaking, and turnaround times being ignored. The net effect was that the last few climbers didn't leave the summit until nearly 8pm, though everybody should have been heading down by the early afternoon.
Then the serac collapsed.
Then it collapsed again.
And again.
Climbers like to divide danger into subjective and objective danger: subjective danger is that which you can control through your skill and experience, and objective danger is that which can only be bypassed or rushed past, like rockfall or avalanche. Or, in this case, collapsing seracs - steep ice-cliffs formed by glaciers. The normal routes up K2 pass through a steep, narrow gully called the Bottleneck, which is overlooked by the huge, overhanging Balcony Serac - a situation that's a textbook example of "objective danger". Some climbers, seeing the rotten state of the Balcony Serac and the backed-up queues in the Bottleneck, abandoned their summit bid early in the day; others were less cautious. The lucky ones escaped with their lives.
Bowley's not a mountaineer, but he's clearly done his research: I spotted a couple of slight infelicities with terminology, but these could be excused as the result of dumbing-down for a non-expert audience. I was unsurprised to see Kurt Diemberger's name among the acknowledgements. Bowley wasn't on the mountain himself, so his narrative switches viewpoint more frequently than Krakauer's; this could be confusing, but Bowley carries it off fairly well. You'll probably need to bookmark the list of climbers at the beginning of the book, though.
The impression I took away from both books was that 8000er-bagging is a crazy game: maximum objective danger, suffering and risk, and minimal technical challenge. Bowley occasionally mentions the stunning, unexpected beauty of K2 and its surroundings, but Krakauer reports only emptiness: even with bottled oxygen, the hypoxia and drudgery sucked all the joy out of his time on the mountain. I mentioned my impressions on Twitter to the polar explorer Alex Hibbert, and he responded "Tourists use a handful of common routes, but independent attempts on 8000ers are still nails... and plenty of harder stuff elsewhere... there are still plenty of climbers quietly opening new routes and climbing out of season - mostly not on Everest at present." I think he's referring to climbs like the recent ten-day Alpine-style first ascent of the West Face of Vasuki Parbat in the Garwhal Himalaya. It's good to know that the high-cost, summit-focused, siege-style climbs of established lines described in Krakauer and Bowley's books aren't the only game in town.
Nurse on Call, by Edith Cotterill
I'd never heard of this book or this author when I picked it up from the display at the library, but it's unexpectedly great. It's Cotterill's tales of being a district nurse in the Black Country in the postwar years. Think James Herriot, but with fewer cows.
I do like it when a random book choice turns out so well.