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Mountains of the Mind
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is the most interesting of the crop of books published to mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest. Macfarlane is both a mountaineer and a scholar. Consequently we get more than just a chronicle of climbs. He interweaves accounts of his own adventurous ascents with those of pioneers such as George Mallory, and in with an erudite discussion of how mountains became such a preoccupation for the modern western imagination.
The book is organised around a series of features of mountaineering--glaciers, summits, unknown ranges--and each chapter explores the scientific, artistic and cultural discoveries and fashions that accompanied exploration. The contributions of assorted geologists, romantic poets, landscape artists, entrepreneurs, gallant amateurs and military cartographers are described with perceptive clarity. The book climaxes with an account of Mallory's fateful ascent on Everest in 1924, one of the most famous instances of an obsessive pursuit. Macfarlane is well-placed to describe it since it is one he shares.
MacFarlane's own stories of perilous treks and assaults in the Alps, the Cairngorms and the Tian Shan mountains between China and Kazakhstan are compelling. Readers who enjoyed Francis Spufford's masterly I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination will enjoy Mountains of the Mind. This is a slighter volume than Spufford's and it loses in depth what it gains in range, but for an insight into the moody, male world of mountaineering past and present it is invaluable. --Miles Taylor
Review
This is a lovely book, one that touches and surprises like sunlight moving across a range of hills. As a child, staying in his grandparents' Scottish home, Macfarlane couldn't sleep one night and idly took down The Fight for Everest from the shelves. In the course of that moonlit night, an obsession was born - one that would lead him to scale mountains himself and ultimately result in this thoughtful meditation on our love of high and remote places. We love mountains, he believes, because 'ultimately. they quicken our sense of wonder. which can so easily be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives'. This is a beautifully written, lyrical and intelligent study that could well appear on the Boardman Tasker shortlist.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A real tour de force,
By
This review is from: Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Hardcover)
This IS one of the most absorbing books I have read for a long time. What is it with our fascination with mountains?Macfarlane traces western man's fascination with mountains, charting the history of mountains and of the men and women who sought to conquer them. The book is worth the cost alone for the description of Mallory's three expeditions to Everest, here portrayed as a love affair that completes take over his life with disastrous consequences. But this is more than just a history. This is an examination of fascination and obsession, a journey through the mountains of the imagination. For anyone who walks or climbs in mountains this book is as Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: a history of walking.
46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant; philosophy meets poetry,
This review is from: Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Hardcover)
I came on line to write an independent review of this brilliant book, but then I saw the review by the reader from Fort William, and it made me rethink what I was going to say. First of all, it's important to say that this is top-class book; a totally new kind of writing about mountains. Second off, it's not just a book about mountains, but about how history works, why people behave the way they do towards different types of landscapes, how we think the world into being, and what issues like guilt, love and betrayal mean when looked at in historical and not just individual terms. in many ways, this is a book of philosophy and poetry, rather than a history of mountaineering, which is perhaps why some people - including the reviewer from Fort William - have been disappointed. It's obvious that Macfarlne isn't a top-drawer climber; he never says that he is in the book, and anyone who knows anything about serious mountaineering could tell he's not. So there's no secret, or misdescription there. The point is, I think, that eveyrone who goes to the mountains goes to them because, in some sense, they love the way they look, and so this book does answer the big WHY question.This is all a bit jumbled. But, in conclusion: this is a very special book, in the tradition of writers like Bruce Chatwin and Barry Lopez in the way it works simultaneously with adventures and ideas, and in the way it thinks about the wild, physical world. READ IT if you love history, language or, indeed, mountains.
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The mind has mountains...,
By
This review is from: Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Hardcover)
This stunning, magnificent, elegantly written book is one of the best books I've read this year. Some reviewers are entirely missing the point. Yes, of course it's about mountains and mountaineering - at its basic level. But its real concerns resonate so much more broadly and deeply. It's about history and geology, natural history and philosophy, literature and poetry; and it's about culture and psychology and self-discovery. And ultimately, after a meticulously woven argument bringing all these threads together, it's about tragedy, and about knowledge and about love. As another reviewer acutely observed, Macfarlane, like Hopkins, encounters the particular nature of things, and celebrates it, in language that's enormously potent, imaginative, and wide-ranging in imagery and vocabulary. Yet these writerly techniques never even for one moment get in the way of meaning or accessibility. It's at all times page-turningly readable. And the chapters just get better and better throughout. In short, it's a work of art. I just can't wait for his next book - whatever it's about.
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