Addicted to Danger: A Memoir About Affirming Life in the Face of Death
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.70 (659 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0671019902 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-05-07 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"He Can't Explain" according to Amazon Customer. This is a great book to read if you want to learn more about Jim Wickwire and some of the mountaineering greats of the modern era. If you want a well-written book that makes you feel as though you're climbing a lonely peak in bitter cold yourself, read Krakauer's "Into Thin Air." For all the time Wickwire has spent in amazing and beautiful surroundings, he seems largely unable to describe them. Wickwire's story telling always seems focused on the action and never on the. "ADDICTED TO DANGER IS ADDICTIVE" according to lawyeraau. This is an absorbing account of the mountaineering adventures of Jim Wickwire, one of the foremost American high altitude mountaineers. It is at times a moving memoir, and at other times somewhat sophomoric in its attempt to explain what drove him to climb, at great cost to his family.The book is nicely illustrated with many photographs of his family, fellow mountaineers, and his beloved mountains. The photographs are well placed, as they go with the flow of the story. . How depressing! Jim Wickwire is certainly one of the top climbers of recent years, but he doesn't seem to have had much fun doing it! This book dwells at great length on one disaster and failure after another (on and off the mountains), while skipping over many of Wickwire's successful climbs, often with a comment over what a letdown it was after reaching the summit. And the part of the book about his greatest triumph (the K2 ascent) ends up being mostly about bickering among the team
McKinley, spending several nights without tents in snowcaves, crevasses, and open bivouacs. He was one of the first two Americans to reach the summit of the 28,250-foot K2, the world's second highest peak, acknowledged as the toughest and most dangerous to climb. "Addicted to Danger" is a tale of adventure in its truest sense.. Along the way he accumulated an extraordinary roster of historic achievements. On two other expeditions he witnessed three fellow climbers plunge thousands of feet, vanishing into the mountain mist.A successful Seattle attorney, Wickwire climbed his first mountain in 1960 and discovered the wonder of leaving behind the complexities of the civilized world for the pure life-and-death logic of granite, glacier, and snow. But with the triumphs came harrowing incidents of suffering and loss that haunt hi
It was a failure not because someone died or suffered a serious injury, but because my obsession to reach the summit helped doom our expedition to disappointment, discord, and, for a time, disgrace." Wickwire's memoir of a climbing life is riveting when he sticks to the mountains--including attempts on Everest, Denali, and Aconcagua--and particularly fascinating for its candid look at the internal machinations of big-time climbing expeditions: the planning, logistics, and training as well as the egos and rivalries that can derail an expedition. "K2, the mountain that would one day represent my greatest success," he writes, "was in 1975 the scene of my greatest failure. But it is a previous expedition to K2 three years earlier--an