Customer Reviews

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

5 star:		(77)
4 star:		(42)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I agree with the last reviewer. The fact that Aron Ralston used poor judgment, i.e. hiking alone and not telling anyone where he was, only makes his story more compelling. Hasn't everyone made a huge mistake that leads to a painful, regretful plight?
Calling the media sensationalistic,in this instance, is just plain silly--amputing one's arm in order to save one's life IS a sensational, highly unusual event. I don't think the media or Aron is making it anything more than what it was. The charge that Aron is self-promoting is just as ridiculous. After you read the book, you will see that Ralston is a humble person with great integrity and strength. He is simply telling his own, true, unbelievable story. Bottomline, this book is incredibly well-written, moving and not to be missed.

Aron's story is intelligent, sincere, warm and at many times, funny. As amazing as the story of his ordeal is, what is nearly as amazing is that something this well-written was created by the person it involved, not a ghost writer. It is nothing short of fine literature, not to mention an obviously compelling story.

Aron inspires us all. He shows us that a motivated person can save himself, and that the force of life can beat unbelievable odds against the force of death.

This is a wonderful book by a clearly remarkable individual. Ralston successfully intertwines prior experiences with his accident in Utah, to give the reader tremendous insight into the many wilderness experiences that shaped him.

At times, the book gives fairly detailed technical renderings of mountaineering experiences, and these passages can be difficult. However, these sections can be easily 'skimmed through' by the non-mountaineer, and most probably savored by those with more hiking/climbing experience.

What makes this book valuable to every reader, including ones who may never face seemingly insurmountable physical challenges, is Ralston's -Joseph Campbell inspired- message of "follow your bliss." It will be the unusual reader who does not finish this book feeling as if they must closely examine their own life, and the course it is taking.

I saw the Dateline NBC special about Aron's ordeal when it aired 3 years ago. I was stunned, as I'm sure everyone who saw it was, and I made a mental note to read this book. But here it is, 2007, and I've only just now gotten around to it.

I don't think this book is all good or all bad - I share many of the same opinions of the others who have reviewed it. One thing I will say is I don't think it's possible to be completely objective and review the BOOK alone, separate from "reviewing" Aron as a person. But when someone writes their autobiography, I think they put themselves out there for judgment, so I won't attempt to make that separation.

First, the writing style. Yes, there are many instances where the descriptions are incredibly overwritten, where you can almost see his conscious effort to make his writing seem "poetic." And his penchant for $2 vocabulary words couldn't be more annoying. But for me there was a huge difference between the writing in the "background" chapters (overwritten and over-detailed) and the writing about the entrapment itself, which is nothing short of vivid, stunning, and remarkable. His ability to put you right there in that canyon with him is amazing. He really is a very good storyteller, and I found myself very intrigued and delighted on numerous occasions to read the unique ways that he describes things.

As others have said, there is way too much technical detail, particularly when he's recounting his past outings. In those passages I found that even with pages of description, I still had a hard time picturing exactly what he was talking about because I'm not a climber (or a skier, or a white-water rafter, or a canyoneer, or a rappeller or a...).

The background chapters do get annoying, and one does get the sense that he's relishing the opportunity to brag to the world. Make no mistake about it, his ego is enormous. But I also understand the necessity of those chapters. People can say that the book should have just been an account of the entrapment, but you couldn't have fully gotten into the head of this guy without knowing his past. He definitely could have used a better editor, though. Those chapters are just too long and too detailed.

Now to Aron. When you read the book you find out that he has faced numerous life and death situations prior to what happened in Blue John Canyon (most of which are not "bad luck" but rather his own risk-taking and poor decision-making). And the interesting thing about him is that he seems to genuinely feel the fear and terror in those moments when death is imminent. But it never seems to stop him from going back for more. That's why reading his story didn't make me think, "wow, this guy really lives life to the fullest." Rather, I felt like I was reading the sad story of someone who is as addicted to adrenaline as a heroine addict is to his drug. I think that Aron will undoubtedly die in the middle of one of his "adventures," but I don't think he'd have it any other way. It makes me wonder if this guy will ever be capable of feeling "alive" via the simple pleasures in life, or if he will always have to be hanging off the side of a mountain or riding raging rapids to experience true joy. It's kind of sad.

Another thing that comes through very clearly about Aron is that he is extremely intelligent and talented. Not only does he have incredible outdoor accomplishments, but it's also clear that he is a very talented engineer, as evidenced by his thought process while he's trapped and the various tactics he designs and tries for getting out. Plus, he plays the piano and as we see in this book, he's a much better than average writer. It would seem that he's a true Renaissance Man. But as the saying goes, there's a fine line between genius and insanity. Which side is Aron on? Well, I guess you can decide for yourself.

It's not entirely clear whether Aron "gets it" at the end because after the rescue there's only a few token pages dedicated to what happened later. Personally I would have preferred much less backstory and more about his recovery, and life and thoughts after the accident. But he wrote this book relatively soon after the ordeal, so maybe the benefit of more perspective will change him. If he's not dead first.

I'll probably hang on to this book but if I ever pick it up to read it again, I'll definitely skip the "I'm the greatest outdoorsman who ever lived" chapters. Bottom line, read this book. You won't regret (or forget) it.

I feel like an 800-pound boulder going in to write anything less than an overwhelmingly positive review of "Between a Rock and a Hard Place". How many people have said they'd give their right arm to have their memoirs reach the bestseller list? Well, outdoorsman Aron Ralston actually did that. Who, then, am I to judge his writing style?

There's no listed ghostwriter, and you can believe Ralston did structure and write the whole book himself. A Carnegie Mellon grad with five years as a mechanical engineer, and well versed in outdoor literature, Ralston comes off as a talented writer (one would hope, however, that he'd avoid the inevitable trap of making his next book a thinly veiled roman-a-clef about a trapped rock climber). However, the book is bogged down by two authorial -- if not editorial -- decisions:

First, the writing style is very technical, and therefore dense. I'm not an outdoorsman; probably the most extreme things I've done in my adult life are to climb the Diamond Head on Oahu, which really just involved walking up a lot of stairs; and an extremely little bit of caving outside of Rapid City, South Dakota. Although Ralston cites to Jon Krakauer as a writing inspiration, he lacks Krakauer's ability to make the extraordinary seem achievable. I felt I could climb partway up Everest after reading "Into Thin Air". After "Between a Rock and a Hard Place", I didn't even think I could ride a bicycle again.

Second, the alternating chapters. I understand the structure of the book: in order to tell his whole life story, while keeping the suspense going, Ralston only describes his ordeal in odd-numbered chapters. The balance of the book leads us first through his outdoors life, and then through the rescue effort that hastened his escape from Blue John Canyon and saved his life. I found myself fidgeting during the earlier anecdotes. While the black bear pursuit and the snow avalanche were gripping adventures, the rest of the tales really didn't add much to my enjoyment of the book -- and see again my complaint about the overly technical writing. Ralston climbed over 40 mountains before the rock climbing accident; he describes every single climb, and I couldn't tell any of them apart when he was done.

I've already recommended this book to others. I admire Ralston's attention to detail, his clinical look back at his own mental state during six days of captivity, and his sense of humor -- the line about his left arm on the book's final page is remarkable. I don't know if I'd be able to go back and watch the videotape I'd made of myself, had I been the one pinned under that boulder -- and Ralston has clearly watched that footage multiple times. This is clearly a man of extraordinary emotional strength. However, his book could have been shorter and perhaps a little more user friendly -- and that's absolutely the worst you can say about it.

I admire Aron's strength, persistence, and drive. Yet within about 40 pages of this book his bravado and obsession with near-death experiences became annoying and tedious. One of the most memorable parts of the book comes when he reveals that two of his friends, both experienced climbers, stopped talking to him after his reckless behavior contributed to the near death of all three of them. Yet, still Aron did not learn from that painful event. He still continues to put himself into danger time and again.

Another telling part of the book comes when he describes a conversation he has with an expert mountaineer. Aron is bragging to him about his climbs, and the expert mountaineer bruskly says that he doesn't do solo climbs.

It is a free country, and therefore Aron can spend his life doing whatever he wants, he can even repeatedly brush with death. However, the public does not have to romanticize him for this.

To call his entrapment a "tragedy" isn't accurate. After all, that wasn't even the deadliest situation he'd gone through in the book. He'd seen rocks fall, had expert mountaineers tell him to always beware of falling rocks. Yes, it was bad luck that this time rocks fell on him, but to say the event was "unexpected" really isn't true, either. The odds just played out and he was there. Sad, yes. Tragic, not really.

Yet even after losing his arm, he still has learned nothing. He continues to take chances and tempt fate. This really is the same mindset that heroin and gambling addicts have. The only difference is that Aron doesn't break any laws.

So take this tale for what it is: a list of Aron's achievements, and a tale about someone who risks his life time after time and eventually gets into a situation he can't get out of scot-free.

This book is the story of Aron Ralston, a youngish hippy who became trapped in a sandstone slot canyon while hiking in a remote area of Canyonlands National Park in southern Utah. As he was hiking solo (without having told anyone where he was) through the lonely Blue John Canyon, a boulder fell onto his arm, and trapped him there for six entire days--with no warm clothing, and very little food and water--until he discovered how to break the bones in his trapped forearm, sever his arm's skin and muscles and tendons and veins, and escape his horrible trap without his right hand.
It's a gruesome, suspensful story, and an amazing adventure, but the book could have been been much shorter, much more concise, and much faster-paced.
For the first half of the book, the author repeatedly interrupts the flow of the narrative to flash back to previous camping and mountaineering trips he'd taken. No doubt this is to show he's an experienced outdoorsman, and not just some foolhardy kid that headed off into a canyon alone, but what it ends up feeling like (despite him attributing the idea for the antilinear structure of the story to Quentin Tarantino) is a long and monotonous list of EVERY CAMPING TRIP HE'D EVER TAKEN, when what I really wanted to hear about was him being stuck in a canyon with a boulder on his arm.
He also talks a lot about all the hippy jam band concerts he'd been to--Phish, the String Cheese Incident, other such awfulness--and even goes as far as quoting irrelevant Phish lyrics for PAGES. If you, like I do, think these bands suck, and that most of their fans are unwashed stoners, then his repeated talk about this aspect of his life can seem a little alienating. The quotes at the starts of each chapter are often pretty dumb as well, ranging from "The Matrix III" to Horace.
Halfway through the book however, things pick up, and what had been a one to two star book improves drastically. Instead of alternately telling about his camping trips, he begins telling about the rescue efforts going on to find him. That's much more interesting, and even touching to see how affected his mother and friends are.
The story's tense gets a little weird here, telling something that happened at the same time as Aron's entrapment (which is told in present tense) in past tense, and the chapters describing the conversations of his worried friends and family feature nothing but dialogue-strictly-for-the-sake-of-exposition type dialogue. It's very clunky.
His escape and rescue however are terrific: jubilant and touching, as is his reintegration back into real not-trapped-beneath-a-boulder life. It's even kind of funny at times, such as when his sister asks him, "Hey Aron, do you need a hand?"
Overall, this is an amazing story; however, it could have used a lot more editing, a lot more focus on the actual story, about a hundred fewer pages, and honestly, a ghostwriter.

The story seems compelling: an unfortunate hiker has his arm pinned by a boulder and must cut off his own arm to rescue himself. It is a terrible thing for anybody to lose part of a limb (indeed, ask any of the many Iraq War casualties), and we like to look for some positive outcome from such a loss. I read this book because I was curious what changes such an experience would cause in one's approach to life. I was left disappointed and angry.

Aron Ralston survived what should have been a life-changing experience, yet came away from it the same arrogant, self-centered boy as before. The reader hopes and prays that the tiresome egotism of the early chapters is simply a literary device, designed to set the stage for Ralston's transformation. Instead, the egotism remains the constant in his life, both before and after his accident.

Although Ralston claims to have had a revelation while pinned behind a boulder -- finally understanding it is not what you have done, but how you have lived -- this revelation is discarded the moment he survives. Once healthy again, Ralston returns to stupid, dangerous activities (e.g., solo winter ascents) with no consideration for those he loves. He has learned nothing. He was given the opportunity to make a major change in his life. He ignored the chance to mature and act responsibly, and returned to reckless behavior that only puts his family and friends at risk of heart ache.

Ralston begins his story by documenting his many stupid mistakes that almost cost him his life. He makes winter ascents of Colorado peaks without spare outer gloves. He pushes himself to the point of hallucinating, putting himself and his partner at risk. He goes solo canyoneering and mountain biking without a first aid kit. He ignores advice of a park ranger and goes hiking in inappropropriate snow conditions, and almost is attacked by a bear. He puts himself and friends at risk skiing in areas with a high risk of avalanche. Despite his supposed training in search and rescue, his ignores the first rule (always let somebody know where you are going and when you should be back). Yet, Ralston seems baffled when his mother doesn't want to hear the details of his latest in a long series of scrapes with death. Perhaps she cares about him. Perhaps she wonders why he insists on always doing things the dangerous way. Perhaps she wonders how he can do these things to her.

There are many ways to immerse one self in the great outdoors, and there are many ways to test one self. Many a young person has thought that placing themselves in life-threatening situations is the ultimate test. Luckily, most of us outgrow this stage. We start to recognize the value of life. We start to recognize the devastation that our deaths would have on our family and friends. We mature.

There are many, many skilled mountaineers in Colorado. Many have the requisite skills to complete solo winter ascents, but most forego the activity because it is stupid. There are too many variables, and the odds of dying are too high. Ralston fancies himself a Super Man because he is dumb enough to go on winter solo ascents. Despite repeated narrow escapes, it never occurs to Ralston that he is being cavalier with his life, the lives of his friends, and the emotions of his family and friends.

The baffling thing about Ralston's history is that he never matured. He had plenty of occasions for reflection, and he had friends endeavoring to change his perspective. Yet, he continued on his own little self-centered journey. He wanted to be bigger than life, no matter what the cost.

Indeed, the bizarre thoroughness of his photo-documentation of his struggle attests to his dreams of grandeur. If he lived, he was going to be famous. If he died, he was going to be a legend. Ralston would have us believe that he was fighting for his life on the hike out, yet he never even considered leaving behind his video camera and digital still camera.

At some point in Ralston's effort to show that he was the prime mover in the many good times with his friends, he recounts making fun of 1980s music. I found this ironic, in that Ralston is the embodiment of the 1980s Me Generation. It is all about Aron, without any consideration for anybody else.

Do not buy this book. To do so is to encourage a reprehensible approach to life. To do so is to reward a selfish little child. To do so is to buy into a false hero. To do so is to support the extreme of self-centeredness. To do so is to cast a foreseeable event (based on poor preparation and a belief of invincibility) as an unavoidable accident. Do not buy this book.

Mr. Ralston was given an opportunity to see the light and to mature, but squandered that chance in exchange for celebrity. If he continues with his solo winter climbing, I fear that he will eventually pay the ultimate price for his contorted self-image and lack of judgment.

Aron is a decent adventure writer, particularly for a novice writer. Fortunately for Aron he made it this far in life to tell of the remarkable events in the canyon. Mr. Ralston is prone to accomplishment for accomplishment's sake, but his race to capture and "bag" peaks was often wasted by careless vanity and an irrational quest for numerosity and self-glory. Worst of all, Ralston drags others down in his suspect voyeurism, like the two experienced climbers who followed him into avalanche country on a backcounrty ski experience. Although Ralston seems to have learned almost nothing post-accident, his wise, intuitive, and inspiring acts when trapped in a most hopeless situation exemplify how we all long to live and long to choose life above all esle. One only hopes that he has learned something from the experience and will seek peace in other things that matter, like forming meaningful human relationships, respecting the land, and drawing the type of courage that can only come from knowing when to call it quits.

I'm surprised all of you 4 and 5 star raters do not see this book for what it really (and obviously) is- a platform for Aron Ralston to boast about his outdoor endeavors and constantly pat himself on the back for his accomplishments. I had an extremely difficult time turning the pages of this self-centered, egotistical outdoor resume- my only motivation not to abandon it being an interest in learning about the actual details of his entrapment and subsequent extraction from Blue John Canyon. Don't get me wrong...Ralston's experience in the slot canyon and his actions to free himself were very brave, compelling and ultimately and completely unfathomable. His actual predicament however, is covered in maybe one-third of the actual text. The other two-thirds of the story is nauseating filler of his achievements in mountaineering, a detailed list of all of his friends and their hometown states, how many Phish concerts he has attended and where, and a random outdoor photo gallery. His attempt at a writing style also fails- I found myself consulting a dictionary at times and re-reading several pages to clarify confusing vocabulary and passages, specifically when he is describing his out-of-body experience in the latter stages of his entrapment. His somewhat reckless (and self-admitted) outdoorsman attitude is precisely what appears to have placed him in his life-threatening predicament (evidenced by a foolish leap into the Colorado River, a disregard for avalanche conditions in which he and two other friends were almost killed, and his repeated insistence on "going it alone" and "doing it faster than anybody else") Additionally, he seems to have come away from his life-changing experience with the exact same attitude as before, not having learned even a shred of a lesson from the incident other than to state that he has achieved somewhat celebrity status, and that he continues to chase records in an effort to break them and set personal goals at an even more accelerated rate (This is obvious by his blatantly idiotic statement that he would not reverse what happened if he had the power to...but instead would continue and then jokingly says he might cut off his other arm to see how high he actually might soar). As compelling as the entrapment and extraction details of this book really are, I am unable to even remotely empathize with Mr. Ralston's plight. Aron Ralston is not, as he states at one point in the book -an outdoorsman. Instead, he is simply a spoiled ego-maniac and adrenaline junkie running loose in the outdoors. Bold Mr. Ralston is...humble he is not! If you are interested in reading good stories of survival in the elements, check out Joe Simpson's Touching the Void (a book that Ralston actually lists as one of his favorites) or Callahan's Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea.