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Left for Dead My Journey Home from Everest Beck Weathers Stephen G Michaud 9780440237082 Books

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Left for Dead My Journey Home from Everest Beck Weathers Stephen G Michaud 9780440237082 Books

Beck Weathers's story - told with fearless honesty- really resonated with me. I'd already read three other accounts of the events on Everest in 1996 - *Into Thin Air* (written from the perspective of a professional writer), *The Climb* (written from the perspective of a professional guide), and *After the Wind* (written from the perspective of a mountaineering client). They were all well-written, and enlightening reads.

But I think of all the books I've read about the tragedies on Mount Everest in 1996, *Left for Dead* is the one that most touched me. It's the first one that dared to talk about what happens AFTER a mountaineering expedition - after the mountain climbers pack up, clear out, head back down the mountain, and fly back into the bosom of their families. For me, this was important terrain.

The last biggish mountain I climbed was Mount Adams. I climbed it during the summer I turned forty-one. At some point in the climb I looked down the slope and the faces of my two young sons - aged three and five - flashed into my thoughts, and it occurred to me that if something happened to me up there, they'd be motherless. When I'd climbed Rainier, Baker, and Hood, I hadn't been a mother. My life had been my own. Now I belonged to two young people. It changed things. My dad, who had been a member of several mountaineering expeditions in his younger days (K2, Mount Saint Elias, Mount Kennedy) and who had been my guide up Rainier, Baker, and Hood, was 79 now, and at about 10,000' decided that was as far as he would go on this climb. So, not only was Mount Adams the last biggish mountain I climbed, it was the first biggish mountain I ever climbed without Dad leading the way.

Reading *Left for Dad* brought back a flood of memories of my climbing adventures with Dad, and it reminded me, too, of that moment when my sons' faces had flashed before my eyes on Mount Adams.

Weathers has a wonderful sense of humor - he knows how to laugh at himself and his circumstances, and I found myself laughing along with him. He's also not afraid to be honest about his own short-comings, flaws, and foibles. He makes mistakes and owns them. And at the end of his book Beck Weathers finds a beautiful redemption for them.

This book was a thoroughly-satisfying read.


Tags : Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest [Beck Weathers, Stephen G. Michaud] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>As featured in the upcoming motion picture Everest, </i> starring Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes,Beck Weathers, Stephen G. Michaud,Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest,Dell,0440237084,Mountaineering;Biography.,Mountaineering;Everest, Mount (China and Nepal),Mountaineers;United States;Biography.,Biography & Autobiography,Biography & Autobiography Adventurers & Explorers,Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs,Biography & Autobiography Sports,Biography Autobiography,BiographyAutobiography,Mountaineering,Personal Memoirs,Sports & Recreation Mountaineering,Sports - General

Left for Dead My Journey Home from Everest Beck Weathers Stephen G Michaud 9780440237082 Books Reviews

Good book. Enjoyable read. I am not sure I know what to think about Beck. It was an amazing ordeal he went through and I'm glad he made it out alive. I just don't know if I wanted the additional back story into his personal life. Yes, that makes for more insight and filler. I just now see him as an average man that survived unsurvivable circumstances. I almost feel sorry for his family and for their life, but I wonder how different we all are when the curtain is pulled back and everything is exposed. This was a very brave book for him to write and I appreciate the time and effort put into this effort. I am really glad I read it. I read into thin air by Jon Krakauer and that is a very fast read because you just get caught up in the amazing events. These books must be read to give you the full story of their time up on the greates mountain of all.
In addition to this book, I am concurrently reading Into Thin Air by Krakauer, and one thing that surprised me was that the prose of Beck Weathers's book seems at least as good as Krakauer's. Some of his descriptions, as when he describes Everest’s Khumbu Icefall, struck me as being even better. The more intimate passages, discussing his physical and mental state, are similarly vivid. Of course, this was written with Stephen Michaud, but the voice and tone -- when Beck and not the other people in his life are commenting -- is so full of character that this is certainly not a project farmed out extensively to someone else. This is Beck's tale, even as it is also his wife's, children's, and to a certain extent, friends' tale. Does it get a bit too granular in the autobiographical stretches, at times? Perhaps that's a matter of taste. But the outstanding fact is that B. W. is someone I feel I would be happy to know. In fact, I came to this book (and Krakauer's) in the first place because I'd seen the 2015 docudrama, Everest, and the Beck character impressed me as the best of the bunch.

Many reviewers remark on how 'flawed' Weathers is. He certainly, in manly fashion, fesses up to having let himself and his family down by allowing outside pursuits to dominate his time (not always mountaineering, but other risky sports through the years as well). Yet what stands out for me is Beck's charisma, and when a friend comments near the end of the book that Beck has a 'great heart', I agree with that on the evidence. There are millions of men (and very many women) that give themselves over to thrill-seeking and materialism in an effort to divert their attention from the spiritual-emotional-intellectual hole at the center of their lives. Then again, many of them are shallow instead of seriously depressed. Beck should be given credit for at least or even heroically attempting to grasp life -- in the ways that he could at the time -- rather than put his head in the oven, like Sylvia Plath, or hang himself, like L'Wren Scott. But Beck seems always to have been a fundamentally good soul and a thoroughly if not perfectly good-natured man. That's an achievement all by itself. The fact is, in the end he shed his depression and found a whole new outlook on life. If Beck is flawed, what does that say about the rest of us? He was never a philosopher, and has suffered all his life till recently because of that. But something in his ordinary life was not good for him, was suffocating him, and made him what we call ‘depressed’. And that very depression points to the fact that his soul was hungering for something more than the material professional success his parents wanted for him.

Beck Weathers wasn’t flawed because he wanted a kind of highness (ironic, as he’s afraid of heights) and refused to be satisfied with the ordinary. He wouldn’t have been happy if he’d tried harder to embrace it. To the contrary, the kind of 'ordinary' that had been given to him was killing him from the inside out. In his confused groping way, he had to reject the ordinary to grab at what really felt like living -- beyond mundane constraints, shallow standards, and invalid judgements. His real problem was that he rejected these ordinary standards of success incompletely. He was still concerned with status, with rating himself. This is why Everest is so meaningful, and this is why its painful repercussions had a kind of emotional logic. It was the near loss of his life on Everest that got him to complete the project of rejecting the definition of 'success' that had done so much to hurt him. This is the lesson of the book on the one hand, Everest nearly got him killed and was apparently disastrous and foolhardy. On the other hand, and more importantly, the man survived and even thrived after the crisis had passed. What Everest really killed off was his attachment to an illusion. To the extent that most of us still believe in that illusion and live with it every day, Beck Weathers is well ahead. Wiser than most -- and funnier -- is my judgement of him. At the end of this greatly touching and compelling book I had rather an emotional moment, and narrowly avoided shedding tears.
For the most part I concur with many other reviews of this book. If you have read Into Thin Air by Krakauer then you may find some enjoyment in this book. The first 25% adds perspective to Beck's experience. I enjoyed this. the last 15% talks about build up to the climb. In between it is an ego centric rambling in which I tried to manufacture some interest waiting a bit for the sub story to go somewhere worthwhile. It is a long hard climb I should say. Sad that someone did not give this nut some good book writing advice. I paid 1.99 cents which is about right. 40% good and 60% terrible.
Beck Weathers's story - told with fearless honesty- really resonated with me. I'd already read three other accounts of the events on Everest in 1996 - *Into Thin Air* (written from the perspective of a professional writer), *The Climb* (written from the perspective of a professional guide), and *After the Wind* (written from the perspective of a mountaineering client). They were all well-written, and enlightening reads.

But I think of all the books I've read about the tragedies on Mount Everest in 1996, *Left for Dead* is the one that most touched me. It's the first one that dared to talk about what happens AFTER a mountaineering expedition - after the mountain climbers pack up, clear out, head back down the mountain, and fly back into the bosom of their families. For me, this was important terrain.

The last biggish mountain I climbed was Mount Adams. I climbed it during the summer I turned forty-one. At some point in the climb I looked down the slope and the faces of my two young sons - aged three and five - flashed into my thoughts, and it occurred to me that if something happened to me up there, they'd be motherless. When I'd climbed Rainier, Baker, and Hood, I hadn't been a mother. My life had been my own. Now I belonged to two young people. It changed things. My dad, who had been a member of several mountaineering expeditions in his younger days (K2, Mount Saint Elias, Mount Kennedy) and who had been my guide up Rainier, Baker, and Hood, was 79 now, and at about 10,000' decided that was as far as he would go on this climb. So, not only was Mount Adams the last biggish mountain I climbed, it was the first biggish mountain I ever climbed without Dad leading the way.

Reading *Left for Dad* brought back a flood of memories of my climbing adventures with Dad, and it reminded me, too, of that moment when my sons' faces had flashed before my eyes on Mount Adams.

Weathers has a wonderful sense of humor - he knows how to laugh at himself and his circumstances, and I found myself laughing along with him. He's also not afraid to be honest about his own short-comings, flaws, and foibles. He makes mistakes and owns them. And at the end of his book Beck Weathers finds a beautiful redemption for them.

This book was a thoroughly-satisfying read.