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Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival (平装)
by Joe Simpson
| Category:
Mountainerring, Outdoors, Nature, Adventure |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An awe-inspiring and uplifting story of the man's ability for survival against all the odds, this book vividly praises the robustness of human spirit. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 9 items |
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New York Newsday (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
Told with lyrical quality and stunning immediacy, Touching the Void transcends its genre and becomes accessible to readers who have never had any desire to climb a glacier. |
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Los Angles Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
Simpson touches a nerve of the mountaineering community and the hearts of others. |
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Philip French (The Observer) (MSL quote), UK
<2007-02-08 00:00>
One of the great stories of survival eloquently described. |
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D. Stuart (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
This is a true story of a mountain expedition in the Andes where two British partners take risks acceptable to experienced and fit climbers. But here they draw a spectacularly bad hand - first with Joe having a terrible bone crunching accident that leaves him scarcely able to move, and then with rapidly deteriorating weather. Partner Simon attempts the impossible and begins an inventive, courageous one-man rescue operation, but half way down the mountain he is forced to make a ghastly choice: stay roped to Joe and both will perish, or cut the rope and make a desperate bid to reach the bottom.
Simon chooses the latter, and the result is horrifying: with Joe plunging into a deep crevasse with no way of climbing up the sheer ice.
But of course this memoir is written by Joe so we know that somehow, against all odds, our author will also get himself to safety. How he does so, and how he skirts around the very edges of death provides the book with its extremely powerful human resonance.
I read this after seeing the excellent movie, and Joe's reflections, at the end of this book about the experience of helping make the film and reliving the horror (he and Simon are played by actors in wide shot, but the climbers provided all the close-up technical shots)- provides additional and unexpected depth and humanity.
There's another reviewer below who was bored by this book. They must have been having a really bad day because Joe's writing takes you right into the heart of his ordeal. This is a stunning story. Five stars aren't enough.
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Marcie Heppermann (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
I highly recommend this astonishing tale of survival and the nature and strength of the human spirit. I disagree with those reviewers that felt the book was too technical and of interest primiarily to sportsman and mountaineers. I am a middle-aged, working mother of three, and rank this book among my favorites of recent memory. I do consider myself to be moderately well-read, and was expecting clumsy writing and poor technique, knowing that this was the author's first book. I was, however, pleasantly surprised. The truth is, after the second or third chapter, I was so gripped by the story that the writing flowed and flowed and flowed. I found that I could not stop reading. When I finally reached the point in the book where Joe is rescued, my own head was pounding and I actually felt thirsty, dehydrated, and exhausted. That is a testimony to the power of his writing. A number of years ago I read Jon Krakauer's book of the Everest disaster, Into Thin Air, as well as Anatoli Boukreev's companion book, The Climb. While both of these (especially Krakauer's book) were excellent reads, they pale in comparison to Touching the Void. This is a must read - for those who crave adventure, as well as those who don't.
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Elizabeth (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
A few weeks back, in search of something good to watch at the video store, I picked up Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void documentary from the shelf. As I was skeptically reading the back of the DVD case, the fellow standing next to me said that it was a "really good movie." I took him on his word and later disovered a movie that I have since been raving about to all who will listen. It is a riveting story in which an injured climber is left for dead on a Peruvian mountain and manages to crawl his way off. It sounds like fiction, but, as is often the case, this true story is incredible beyond what a writer could believable construct. So, when I found out that Joe Simpson (the climber left on the mountain) had written a book, Touching the Void about his harrowing adventure, I knew I needed to read it.
The movie and the DVD extras take the viewer on an emotional path where one at first dislikes the arrongant and impetuous Simpson, while his climbing pal Simon Yates seems more sympathetic. However, as the movie continues and especially if you watch the Return to Siula Grande DVD extra, it becomes hard not to empathize with Simpson's reaction to returning to the place where he had faced so much trauma and to, in contrast, find Yates cold and unfeeling, as if the experience they shared so many years before no longer affected him personally. The end of the movie leaves one with the impression that Simpson, although understanding at what Yates did, does not really like Yates and does certainly not consider him a friend.
The book, written several years earlier, certainly leaves a more positive impression of Yates. While Simpson admits to having written the book in part to clear Yates's name in the climbing communitry, his storytelling takes the reader beyond a defense of Yates's actions. In fact, Simpson's description of Yates's attempt to lower the injured Simpson down the mountain portrays an act that is nothing short of heroic. It is clear that his cutting the rope was a last, desperate resort to end a situation in which there was no way out.
While the book and the movie both tell very closely the same story, reading the book and seeing the movie is neither a redundant experience nor an exercise in detecting differences in the two plots. In fact, the one enriches the story in the other. The maps and the first-person telling in the book complement the documentary-style script and the sweeping vistas caught on film. |
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Wayne Smith (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
This is a book that gets you thinking. 1. Would I even try climbing an expert level mountain? 2. Would I cut a lifeline sending my partner to certain death if I knew not cutting would kill us both? 3. Would I have the will to endure crushing pain and desperation when it all could be ended easily by just giving up?
I think the third question was easiest for me. The will to live is just too great in most of us to give up. However, as we read of Joe Simpson's incredible climb out of an icy hell - on a severely broken leg, each step one of excruciating pain, we can understand when he asks himself the same question.
On the first, no. I get all the tough mountain climbing thrills I need vicariously through Jon Krakauer's books or one's like this. I understand that some are driven to assault the globe's most difficult peaks, but I just don't see the point. Almost all of the wonderful mountaineering books of the last decade involve death and mayhem among people who knowingly chose to place themselves in positions where those outcomes were a high probability.
The second question is the most difficult and the one the reader will ask himself over and over during this very well written book.
Joe Simpson and Simon Yates climbed a forbidding peak in South America alone, with their only support a neophyte camped a few miles from the starting point in a camp itself a day's mule ride away from civilization. The climb up went well enough, but on the way down the snow encrusted and storm tossed mount, Simpson broke his leg horribly in a fall. Improvising a plan for Yates to lower Simpson down a crevice riddled glacier one painful rope length at a time, the pair started their self-rescue at night. The first few hours went painfully slow, then Simpson reeled over a cliff into nothingness. Unable to see what had befallen Simpson, Yates hung on above - the rope slowly but surely pulling Yates himself toward the abyss. Knowing (in both their minds at that time according to the book) that to hold on would kill them both, Yates made the supremely difficult decision to cut the rope - condemning Simpson to a long fall and probable death - to save himself.
The next morning after climbing down, Yates could only see a snow covered crevice which he assumed his friend had plummeted into from high above. Unknown to Yates, Simpson had miraculously landed on a snow ledge below the lip of the crevice - mangled leg and all. The weak ice roof of the crevice had slowed his fall enough to permit survival. Yates went off to camp heavy with the knowledge he had killed his friend and sure the world would neither understand nor forgive.
Simpson, meanwhile, endured a 48 hour plus ordeal to drag his wrecked body 50 or so feet out of the crevice and then over miles over rough ground to camp. As you might imagine, the reuniting of Simpson and Yates was quite a scene.
This book is taught and well written. Although Simpson's book, Yates is given space to describe in his own words the story from his perspective from the point he thought his fateful decision had separated their paths.
This is a great survival story and leaves the reader asking: "Would I, could I, have cut the rope?" |
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Andy Gill (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
This might not apply to American readers (or it may, I don't know) but there's a huge misconception in the UK as to what this book is about. I work in a bookshop and we're selling this by the dozen, which infuriates me not because I do not believe it should sell well and be widely read, but because people are buying it for the wrong reason.
Touching the Void is, simply put, the story of the human spirit's ability for survival against all the odds. There are many occasions where both Joe and Simon could have given up; many moments when it could all have been for naught; but they kept going, and both lived to tell the tale. Simpson's writing is, as ever, vivid and visceral, putting you up on Siula Grande with him. We vicariously experience his time in the crevasse, his efforts on the glacier, and then his crawl back towards the camp, wondering if there will be anybody there even if he does make it. You know all along that he survives, but when he reaches safety you want to cry out because he describes it so painfully well. This is what the book is about.
With the impending release of the movie, and widespread radio coverage in the UK featuring interviews and editorials, a terrible misconception has crept in. Almost everyone who has come into the shop and asked me about the book has said, "I heard about this book on the radio. It's about a climber who cuts the rope on his friend. Do you have it?" By focussing on Simon Yates' cutting of the rope, it seems that everyone is missing the point. Far from a cold-hearted act, everybody fails to acknowledge that had Yates not lowered Simpson down several thousand feet of the mountain, a non-stop feat of incredible courage and fortitude, Simpson would not have survived, period. Simpson himself does not blame Yates for his actions, and this is the lead we should be taking. All these people who have never been on a mountain in their lives saying, "Ooh, he broke the code, he shouldn't have done that," just have no idea.
I'm glad the book is selling well, and deservedly so, but I wish it could sell for the right reasons and not because people want the inside story on The-Man-Who-Cut-The-Rope. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-08 00:00>
How far can the human body be pushed before total collapse? What can the mind endure before succumbing to what seems like inevitable termination? Joe Simpson's tale of survival after what should have been a fatal mountaineering event begins to explore the limits of human capability. Readers in our book group felt the prose was not first rate but written well enough that few wanted to put the book down. This book is good enough to become canon in mountaineering literature. For those with no mountaineering experience, some of the climbing aspects and descriptions may be difficult to envision. Nonetheless it is an amazing story. Our group read this in conjunction with Caroline Alexander's book "The Endurance", another incredible story of survival against unbelievable odds. While Simpson's ordeal occurs over the span of a few days, the story of Shakleton's group living on the ice for nearly two years explores the other spectrum of what it takes to survive - the two stories seem to compliment each other in the scope of human endurance.
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1 Total 1 pages 9 items |
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