|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Biography of Scott Fischer Mar 06, 2010
Essentially a biography of Scott Fischer by a close friend. A gut wrenching story of Fischer's early mountaineering accomplishments including the formation of his company Mountain Madness. The early chapters include the authors personal friendship with Fischer and go on to include Fischer's exploration of the Himalaya. The story ends sadly in Fischer's untimely death on Mount Everest in 1996. Despite the mainstream media's parsing of the events of that expedition which was well documented in Jon Krakauer's book "Into Thin Air", you can't help but feel that Fischer was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Birkby captures the essence of Scott Fischer as a quintessential outdoorsman and mountaineer and narrates the book by including his personal knowledge of Fishcer's home and family life.
An outstanding tome that will give you a better insight into how difficult, and personally consuming, a life as a high altitude mountaineer can be.
Fischer famously made it to the summit of K2 with Ed Viesturs, the first American to summit all 14 of the planet's 8000 meter peaks.Viesturs documents his last encounter with Fischer's frozen body high on Everest in his book "No Shortcuts to the Top".
Spellbinding!
Well done!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 He climbed until the day he died Feb 14, 2009
For most people, Scott Fischer is known only as one of the two American mountain guides who died on Everest in the awful year of 1996. Robert Birkby had known him for about 15 years. Fischer introduced Birkby to mountaineering with a climb up Olympus (WA), and they'd climbed together many times since.
As an outdoor writer, Birkby is in a good position to write Fischer's biography. It begins when a teen-aged Fischer in New Jersey sees a TV show on the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming. He goes out for an NOLS class and rapidly becomes and instructor. Backpacking, rock climbing and then alpine mountaineering become his life. Fischer is outgoing and enthusiastic and builds a wide circle of friends around him as he builds a barely-successful mountain guiding business. He expects to climb until the day that he doesn't come back down, and eventually that day happens.
The book lacks a big spark, theme or insight that would move it up my recommendations list. It's a good biography and if you like to read about mountaineering and the outdoors you'll probably like it. If that's not your thing, then this book won't be your thing either.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
You may be a Friend of Scott and not know it yet Nov 07, 2008
Actually I get the feeling that we're all Friends of Scott. The book is a blast to read, even knowing how Scott Fischer met his end on Everest. Who knew mountain climbers had so much fun? Fischer is lovingly portrayed and you wish you could go on an adventure with him. If his death as described in "Into Thin Air" wasn't heartbreaking enough, this book details why he was so well known and loved. Yet the book isn't sad, more of a loving biography of an astounding climber. One of the best books I've read in a long time. Uplifting and heartening. The author patiently sought out and interviewed people who had known Scott throughout his life. The overall effect is like an entire sports stadium roaring approval. Great read. Highly recommended.
16 of 16 found the following review helpful:
Mountain Madness gets it right Jun 16, 2008
Scott Fischer's name as a mountaineer was as well known within the international mountaineering community as it was little known by the general public until his tragic death on Mount Everest during the deadly climbing season of May 1996. That deadly season at the top of the world captured the public's imagination not only because of the significant loss of life, but also because for the first time, the mostly private business of challenging the world's highest summit was available for the first time to all who were interested on the internet, over satellite phones and through Jon Krakauer's presence as an "imbedded" journalist for Outside magazine.
With Scott's death, Birkby lost a close friend and an influence in his own life going back to 1982 when the two men, who had only recently met, climbed Mt. Olympus together in Olympic National Park. Although Birkby's evolution as a highly skilled and well known outdoorsman had taken him on a self described "horizontal approach to America's wild places" his new friendship with Scott inspired new types of vertical adventures with Scott and his commercial climbing company Mountain Madness that included expeditions to the summits of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Elbrus and even eventually, to the famous Everest base camp.
Birkby's healing from the loss of his good friend began on the SCA high school crew he led in Grand Teton National Park the summer following the tragedy. But even as the pain eased, Bob and other member's of Scott's community grew frustrated with the incomplete portrait of who Scott was as a man, a father and a mountaineer that emerged publicly in major accounts of the accident. And so he eventually began a search for the truth of who Scott was, mostly gained through the eyes and hearts of those who knew Scott best, that Birkby chronicled in a manuscript that he was never sure would be published.
It is to our great good fortune that not only did Mountain Madness eventually find its way to publication last February, but also that one of the book's most influential and articulate story tellers about Scott's life was Bob Birkby himself. This first person narrative tells great stories of adventures but also seeks - quite successfully - to ask and answer questions about why people seek out adventure in the outdoors and how we succeed or fail in balancing this need with other priorities in our lives.
Scott was both a charismatic and controversial character, a fact that Birkby both acknowledges and illuminates. From his tracing of Scott's boyhood in New Jersey, watching a documentary on television about the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) that led to his odyssey to Wyoming's highest places, to his early frustrations of trying to make a living by following his passion with his company Mountain Madness, the reader learns much about what drove Scott Fischer to the heights he sought.
And while Birkby had no intention to add yet another book to the considerable cannon of Everest disaster literature, the quality of his research and the trust his interviewees obviously placed in his integrity and commitment to tell Scott's story does in fact shed some new light on that fateful May expedition. But perhaps more importantly the author has succeeded in telling the story of a man, his community and what came to be a far more fleeting moment in the history of high elevation mountaineering than any of the real people living in that moment could have recognized at the time.
As readers come to different conclusions regarding the who the real Scott Fischer was and how well Scott met the challenges of his own life and goals, Mountain Madness succeeds fully in articulating the call that wild places has on so many of us. And by the end of the book too, we realize that with his crisp descriptive prose, his own vast experience and deep sensitivity to human triumph and fragility, Bob Birkby was our perfect guide to this remarkable story.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
High Adventure and Thoughtful Portrait Jun 01, 2008
I got caught up in Mountain Madness and barreled through it in a week. Because Fischer's life is so crammed with the incredible, in the hands of the wrong writer, it could easily become a boring litany of outrageous feats. However, Robert Birkby gets it right. Each climb is unique in its setting, challenges, and personalities. And make no mistake, the book is crammed full of incredible adventure, both terrifying and triumphant.
It was a lot of fun to read about the camaraderie and good times the climbers have when they are not risking their lives on the mountains. I'm afraid of heights, but I sure would have enjoyed hanging out with this guys on level ground. In fact, one of the things I appreciated was not feeling like an earth-bound outsider, looking in on the gods of climbing. Through Birkby, who was a friend of Fischer's and is also admittedly more of a horizontal hiker, I felt squarely anchored in the book. I also appreciated that Birkby is an outdoorsman, and I always felt like I was in the hands of someone who understood the process of climbing.
Lastly, this is an excellent portrayal of a fascinating person. I got a good understanding of the drive behind Fischer's climbing. He seemed like a man with a relentless hunger, and yet a thoughtful man, who was struggling for balance in his life.
|
| | |
