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Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival

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Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks
Brand: Liberty Mountain
List Price: $14.95
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Joe Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, had just reached the top of a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes when disaster struck. Simpson plunged off the vertical face of an ice ledge, breaking his leg. In the hours that followed, darkness fell and a blizzard raged as Yates tried to lower his friend to safety. Finally, Yates was forced to cut the rope, moments before he would have been pulled to his own death.

The next three days were an impossibly grueling ordeal for both men. Yates, certain that Simpson was dead, returned to base camp consumed with grief and guilt over abandoning him. Miraculously, Simpson had survived the fall, but crippled, starving, and severely frostbitten was trapped in a deep crevasse. Summoning vast reserves of physical and spiritual strength, Simpson crawled over the cliffs and canyons of the Andes, reaching base camp hours before Yates had planned to leave.

How both men overcame the torments of those harrowing days is an epic tale of fear, suffering, and survival, and a poignant testament to unshakable courage and friendship.

DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Brand: Liberty Mountain
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.522092
EAN: 9780060730550
Is Autographed: 0
ISBN: 0060730552
Is Memorabilia: 0
Label: Harper Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2004-01
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Studio: Harper Paperbacks


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
• Into the Wild
• Touching the Void
• Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains
• Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: Brain Bending, Heart Pounding Tale
Comment: In every genre, there are books that set the bar. Touching the Void sets the bar for survival tales at a dizzying height. I chow down on outdoor adventure stories regularly, both historical and contemporary. From Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air to Apsley Cherry-Gerard's The Worst Journey in the World, I've stared goggle-eyed at the pages that illustrate the human capacity for endurance, and document the raw will to survive some men/women radiate. Touching the Void rocked me back on my heels.

Touching the Void is more than a survival tale. The ethical dilemma of what to do when a fellow climber's injury puts his partner's survival in jeopardy has never been discussed more eloquently. One human's choice to survive has rarely, if ever, been detailed in more harrowing and excruciating detail. There are many tales of climbers on Everest, intent on their one shot at the tallest peak in the world, walking by injured and dying climbers without offering assistance. Touching the Void provides a similar dilemma in a uniquely personal and horrifying way.

My book group (six couples) couldn't shut up about this book, even though none of us are climbers. Why? Because author Joe Simpson powerfully casts the irresistably baited hook "What would YOU do if YOU were in this circumstance?", and the twelve people in our group bit, and bit HARD.

If you are a reader of outdoor adventure, your reading list is simply incomplete if you haven't read this. If you're the type that thinks outdoor excursions should be confined to mad dogs and Englishmen, read it anyway. It will change the way you think about human capacity, and your own capabilities. If I was all thumbs, this book would get a ten thumbs up!

Customer Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite wilderness survival stories
Comment: So I've read, Simpson's survival is widely regarded by mountaineers as amongst the most amazing pieces of mountaineering lore in history. And I can see why. I literally could not put this book down and even cried into my cereal.

Customer Rating:
Summary: True Story
Comment: Very heart jumping book. Keeps you on the edge of every page. Worth the read.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Comment: Gripping reality......never have I read anything that is such a true tale of seizing whatever energy and means you have to work with ....and choosing to keep going...no matter what....to survive........brilliant.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good
Comment: Joe has a taut, spare style of writing. Perhaps the only negative one can point to is that he goes a little too much into techno-speak on mountaineering. However, this is forgivable since that was the audience he was writing for. That the book became a general public bestseller was a surprise. In a sense he writes sort of like Mickey Spillane- with spare descriptions, clipped, but not as taut as MS. But, there are some soaring moments of poetry- especially one scene where Joe describes looking out of the crevasse at stars at night in a dreamy poetic way that makes a very familiar scene seem new. He also has taken Simon's story, told to him since they were separated, and crafted a compelling counter-narrative that acts antiphonally with Joe's own tale. We get to parallax the whole tale, which lends far more realism than a singular viewpoint would.

The only negative part of the book is the ending, in which little aftermath is given. While this is a good technique to start the book off with- we get little background information on Joe and Simon (later in the memoir we get a few digressions to past expeditions by them and others), and a few tantalizing hints as to the rich life Richard Hawking has led- we are so drawn to these characters that to not be given information feels a cheat. But, that would be acceptable had the actual ending been good, narratively or in its mere construction, or left us in a particular moment as we had been in other parts of the book. Instead we end the book with this dreamy recollection of Joe's being readied for surgery on his broken leg in a hospital a few days after his rescue, and his desire to not be operated on in Peru:

A strong hand pressed me back. Another gripped my arm and I felt the slight pain of the needle. I tried to lift my head but somehow it doubled in weight. Turning to the side I saw a tray of instruments. Above me bright lights came on, and the room began to swim before my eyes. I had to say something....had to stop them. Darkness slipped over the lights and slowly all sounds muffled down to silence.

That's it. After this rousing tale the reader is left with this wet noodle of an ending. This frustrates a reader far more than the slight drag a reader feels by reading of the duo's every single little mountaineering movement and the accompanying emotions they felt. That, at least, lent a compelling authenticity to the narrators' voices. So did the descriptions of the physicality of the men, mountain, and meteorological conditions. The end, alack....

That said, this book is far better written than most of the `creative writing' peddled at MFA programs. Had he gone there before writing this I'm sure the book would have been over twice its 184 pages, and larded with banal digressions that eked into every little detail of Joe's and Simon's childhoods, endeavoring to find the `real meaning' behind why Simon cut the rope. Fortunately, Joe's a better writer than that, and better than Simon, a part of whose book Joe quotes from in an afterword called Ten Years On.... It's obvious from the selection that Joe wrote Simon's soliloquy in his own book, and does a really good job of empathizing with the man a lesser man might scorn as someone who abandoned him.

It's rare that such an archetypal story is so concisely well-written, especially considering this was Joe's first effort- usually these sorts of Gilgameshian man vs. nature epics are long on the epic tale, and short on the ability to convey it. Almost as rare as the adventure it describes.

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