The History Book Club discussion
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MOUNTAIN CLIMBING
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Reuters
May 02, 2016 11:00 AM
FILE - An aerial view shows the Himalayan mountain range along the border of Nepal and Tibet. Mount Everest, the tallest in the range, is also the world's tallest mountain with an altitude of 8,848 meters (29,028 feet), March 25, 2008
The bodies of renowned U.S. mountaineers Alex Lowe and David Bridges, who were killed in a 1999 avalanche in the Himalayas, have been found by another pair of climbers, according to a charity founded and run by Lowe's widow.
Climbers David Goettler of Germany and Ueli Steck of Switzerland were preparing for an attempt to reach the summit of Shishapangma in Tibet, the world's 14th-highest peak, when they discovered two bodies encased in ice on a glacier, the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation said in a statement posted to its website on Friday.
The bodies had clothing and backpacks that matched the gear Lowe and Bridges were wearing when they disappeared.
Remainder of article:
http://www.voanews.com/content/bodies...
Source: Voice of America
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Stephen O'SheaSynopsis:
Scaling the peaks
For centuries the Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers, and the dreams of engineers. Some 14 million people live among their peaks today. Stephen O'Shea takes us up and down these majestic mountains on a 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia.
O'Shea explores the crossing of Hannibal and his elephants; reveals the Alps' influence on culture, from Heidi to The Sound of Music; and visits locales including the site of the Italians' retreat in World War I, the spot where Arthur Conan Doyle staged Sherlock Holmes' death scene, and Hitler's notorious aerie, the Eagle's Nest.
The Alps is a breathtaking blend of travelogue and historical narrative.
Review Quotes
"An ebulllient narrative. . . . This spirited jaunt into the peaks of Europe may inspire readers to pack their bags."-Kirkus Reviews
"A graceful and passionate writer."-The Washington Post
About the Author
Stephen O'Shea spent many years as a journalist in Paris and New York. He is the author of several books, including Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I and Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World.
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Barry LopezSynopsis:
Barry Lopez's National Book Award-winning classic study of the Far North is widely considered his masterpiece.
Lopez offers a thorough examination of this obscure world-its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores.
But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is his unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. Its prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes,
Arctic Dreams is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature.
Awards:
National Book Award for Nonfiction (1986), Oregon Book Award for Nonfiction (1987), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (1986)
Review:
Robert Macfarlane, author of an acclaimed trilogy of books about landscape and human thought reviews some of his favourite books of nature-writing with FiveBooks
You have described Lopez as one of the most important writers about wilderness. Please tell us about Arctic Dreams.
This book changed my life and really made me become a writer, if any one book did. I remember finding a very battered secondhand copy of it in a bookshop in Vancouver while I was out climbing in the Rockies, in my early twenties.
Put most simply, the book is an account of the Arctic’s anthropological, cultural and natural histories. But it’s also, like all the books on my list, an investigation into how we imagine place, and the more complicated question of how place imagines us – how we are brought to think in certain ways by certain landscapes. It was a bestseller in the 1980s in America, and is still a legendary book for many people. It was part of a surge of extraordinary writing about landscape that occurred in America between the late 1970s and early 1990s.
Lopez is as at ease in explaining the migration paths of narwhals or the spiritual history of early Celtic Christianity as he is with writing in the pristine moment. That combination of an etched sharpness to his imagery – it’s modernist prose-poetry really – with a deep knowledge born of reading and being out in the environment, was utterly inspiring to me. I saw that non-fiction could be as creative and beautiful as any fiction.
Lopez spent five years in the Canadian Arctic as a biologist. How does he make a book about the tundra and miles of snow and ice engaging for the reader?
This is one of the big problems with landscape writing – landscape doesn’t really do plots and it doesn’t really do suspense.
Lopez keeps us reading largely through style. He changes focus a great deal. He moves around in time. Time will suddenly deepen – an arrowhead found on the tundra will lead him back into pre-history, and from pre-history we will race forwards to the instant of a caribou seen across open ground, or a whale surfacing, or a bird of prey stooping. I find that rapidity and variety of movement in time and across space exhilarating.
Momentum in Lopez’s work is all about the quality of the writing and thinking. There’s an extraordinary chapter which he begins by standing at a point on the shore where the total tidal range is about an inch. He stands there for hours, while the tide comes in its full inch and then recedes. Only Lopez could make page-turning prose out of that incident.
He said that the defining quality of the wilderness is that it draws attention to the “narrow impetuosity” of our human schedules. Are writers about the wild driven solely by their fascination with the natural world, or also by misanthropy?
That’s a very good question, and an important one to ask of any book about nature – how deep is its green? When Lopez is talking about narrow impetuosity of human schedules, he is talking about a hectic, Western, late-modern, capitalist time.
He’s not talking about the kinds of time experienced and practiced by some of the native inhabitants of the region. Unlike John Muir, one of the founding fathers of the American conservation movement, Lopez is alert to the people who have lived and continue to live in these landscapes.
He doesn’t write them out at all, though there are books which do. He’s suspicious of certain ways of being human, and very approving of others."
More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/robe...
Source: FiveBooks
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Nan ShepherdSynopsis:
The Living Mountain is a lyrical testament in praise of the Cairngorms. It is a work deeply rooted in Nan Shepherd's knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places.
Drawing on different perspectives of the mountain environment, Shepherd makes the familiar strange and the strange awe-inspiring. Her sensitivity and powers of observation put her into the front rank of nature writing.
Review:
Robert Macfarlane, author of an acclaimed trilogy of books about landscape and human thought reviews some of his favourite books of nature-writing with FiveBooks
"What would you say are the characteristics of great landscape writing?
Precision and particularity, combined with an appeal to the universal. The very best books are often those that look the most closely but think most broadly. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is only – apparently – about the Cairngorms, a single mountain group in north-east Scotland.
But actually, it’s about the relationship between the human mind and place. Great landscape writing can blend the almost mythic and the astonishingly well observed.
The underlying narrative of much landscape writing is man’s relationship and interaction with the natural world.
There are many versions of that question or preoccupation. Some of the books I have chosen are about connection with nature, and some are about its terrifying disinterest. The wilderness can be a very welcoming and miraculous place, but it can also be fatal in its complete indifference to human presence. The wild – that extreme manifestation of nature – is both exhilarating and, sometimes, murderous."
More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/robe...
Source: FiveBooks
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Synopsis:
Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is the most interesting of the crop of books published to mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest.
Macfarlane is both a mountaineer and a scholar. Consequently we get more than just a chronicle of climbs. He interweaves accounts of his own adventurous ascents with those of pioneers such as George Mallory, and in with an erudite discussion of how mountains became such a preoccupation for the modern western imagination.
The book is organised around a series of features of mountaineering--glaciers, summits, unknown ranges--and each chapter explores the scientific, artistic and cultural discoveries and fashions that accompanied exploration.
The contributions of assorted geologists, romantic poets, landscape artists, entrepreneurs, gallant amateurs and military cartographers are described with perceptive clarity.
The book climaxes with an account of Mallory's fateful ascent on Everest in 1924, one of the most famous instances of an obsessive pursuit. Macfarlane is well-placed to describe it since it is one he shares.
MacFarlane's own stories of perilous treks and assaults in the Alps, the Cairngorms and the Tian Shan mountains between China and Kazakhstan are compelling.
Readers who enjoyed Francis Spufford's masterly I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination will enjoy Mountains of the Mind. This is a slighter volume than Spufford's and it loses in depth what it gains in range, but for an insight into the moody, male world of mountaineering past and present it is invaluable. --Miles Taylor
Review:
Robert MacFarlane being interviewed by FiveBooks:
The underlying narrative of much landscape writing is man’s relationship and interaction with the natural world.
There are many versions of that question or preoccupation. Some of the books I have chosen are about connection with nature, and some are about its terrifying disinterest. The wilderness can be a very welcoming and miraculous place, but it can also be fatal in its complete indifference to human presence. The wild – that extreme manifestation of nature – is both exhilarating and, sometimes, murderous.
Your most recent book The Old Ways touches on this question of the connection of between man and landscape, doesn’t it?
Yes it does. I have written three books which together form a loose trilogy about landscape and human thought. The first, Mountains of the Mind, was about why people might be willing to lose limbs or even life for their love of mountains – which are, after all, nothing but geological structures
More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/robe...
Source: FiveBooks
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'If he slips, he falls. If he falls, he dies' -- Climbing 3,000 feet without ropes
By Ben Church, CNN
Updated 6:20 AM ET, Thu February 21, 2019
(CNN)Any doubts as to whether Alex Honnold was the greatest rock climber of all time were doused when the American did something that no one thought was humanly possible.
In June 2017, the 33-year-old became the first person to climb Californian granite monolith El Capitan without any ropes -- a skill known as free soloing.
Situated in Yosemite National Park, USA, the gargantuan rock face soars 3,200 feet into the air, standing almost 500 feet taller than the Burj Khalifa -- the world's tallest building.
There is simply no room for error. If he slips, he falls. If he falls, he dies.
Remainder of article:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/21/sport/...
Source: CNN
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (other topics)The Living Mountain (other topics)
Arctic Dreams (other topics)
The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to,and Beyond (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Robert Macfarlane (other topics)Nan Shepherd (other topics)
Barry Lopez (other topics)
Stephen O'Shea (other topics)
We honor all of them here.
I did not place this thread under sports because it is an extreme undertaking best served being under Exploration (Explorers). These folks undertake great life or death situations and place themselves in peril. They are exploring the breadth of their stamina, courage, expertise, judgement and strength.
Climb the mountains and rejoice in their natural spirit and the dramatic views they offer. Photograph copyright Buena Vista Images/Getty Images