Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Hardcover)

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.

This is a magnificent book. Written with crystalline clarity and a breathtaking breadth of knowledge, it deserves to be recognized as a classic piece of mountaineering literature. And the emphasis should be on the word literature. Macfarlane is an experienced and adventurous climber but it is the energy and precision that he puts into exploring the literary and abstract meanings of mountains that make this book so exciting. Macfarlane's own fascination with mountains began in his grandfather's Scottish home when, at the age of 12, he selected The Fight for Everest (the story of George Mallory's failed attempt on Everest) as night-time reading. The truly revealing thing about this episode is how Macfarlane describes spending time in his grandmother's wardrobe and playing amongst her fur coats. With this first, almost immediate evocation of Narnia and a world ruled by a cruel and careless mistress who freezes anyone who crosses her into a motionless statue, Macfarlane effortlessly sets the scene and the standard for a book that is as much about literature as it is about mountaineering. This is an unusual, if not unique blend, of poetic meditation, personal memoir, climbing guide and geological primer. It's difficult to think of a reader who would not get something from this book, but it is an absolute must-have for armchair mountaineer bookworms who like to read about frostbite, ice and avalanches from the safety of a suburban home with the central heating turned up. (Kirkus UK)

A crisp historical study of the sensations and emotions people have brought to (and taken from) mountains, laced with the author's own experiences scrambling among the peaks. Mountains were once thought of as godless and lawless places, best to be avoided. By the 17th century, those associations were changing, says Macfarlane (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), as a geology beyond scripture was first being understood, and by the 19th century the hills were being read like great stone books, "ghostly landscapes which had suddenly opened up under the scrutiny of geology." Also by then, the mountain landscape had been vested with a complex aesthetic that embraced terror and elation, a filter to an ancient and atavistic world that scorned the appalling transience of a human life ("What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die"). Macfarlane intelligently probes the push/pull of the peaks, the odd but real pleasure of fear-its centrality to the experience-and the exhilaration of a moment reduced to the neat binaries of danger and safety, right move and wrong move, living and dying, the "human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the human mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion." George Mallory is a good example, whose Everest days Macfarlane sketches. A certain amount of melodrama is inevitable when the stakes are mortal, as is a measure of magniloquence-"the unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space"-yet Macfarlane works hard to keep his sojourns in the Cairngorms, the Rockies, and the Tian Shan expressively sharp and enticing. Macfarlane adds his bit to the long lore of mountaineering, but his encounters with the peaks themselves have special presence and acuity. (b&w illustrations) (Kirkus Reviews)

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