I can't seem to decide if I like this book. It feels like a trashy tabloid at times and yet, it was relatively interesting enough to keep me reading (tho' some parts just felt like a couple whining about each other). The survival of Beck Weathers was an unexplainable miracle and I was quite captivated by that story. Both Yatsuko (a Japanese woman who was on her 7th summit) and Weathers were stranded overnight on Everest and exposed to a freak storm. Yatsuko didn't survive and it looked as if weathers wasn't going to as well, which explained the title of the book. However, Weathers suddenly awoke from his "coma" after "seeing" his family and despite suffering severe frostbite to his face and hands and being blind, he managed to make his way back to the camp. I enjoyed the part when Madan the pilot, wanting to test whether he possessed the heart of a warrior, agreed to go on the risky Med evac of weathers. It amazes me how someone would risk their own life for a total stranger.
The exciting bits of the book were obviously the summiting of Everest and the rescue. The darker bits were when he talked about the "black dog" in his life, which drove him to his mountaineering madness. I guess subconsciously, Weathers did wish for death, thereby risking his life for that adrenaline rush and giving up his family in the midst. He himself mentioned that at one point in his life, he was seriously considering ending it all. A psychiatrist later confirmed the same and advised his wife to surrender all the guns in their home. I guess a lot of times when we are trying to escape that hollowness we feel in our lives, we busy ourselves with a million other distractions to deny that we have a problem. This is especially true I think, when we ourselves are convinced that with such a blessed life, we are not entitled to be depressed or to have that feeling of emptiness. We all have to face our demons some day although sometimes we may be too late. In the case of Weathers, it took a near-death experience for him to recognize his problems and to learn what were the truly important things in life-love. In a way he was lucky. Some people lose their lives before they could ever learn such truths. I guess the book deserves a 3/5 rating.
No comments:
Post a Comment