Customer Reviews

Facing The Extreme: One Woman's Tale of True Courage, Death-Defying Survival and Her Quest For The Summit

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

One unfortunate outgrowth of the success of excellent climber/writers such as Jon Krakauer, Greg Child and Bill Sherwonit is the publication of books such as Facing the Extreme, which seek to capitalize on the sudden interest in human suffering in the mountains. Facing the Extreme, by Ruth Anne Kocour and Michael Hodgson is filled with many seemingly small factual errors, which in the end add up, and made me question Ms. Kocour's journalistic credibility (though she is not a journalist by trade, it is still her responsiblity as an author to get it right). Though not a factual error, in the Author's Note, Ms. Kocour tells us that she has changed the names of her fellow climbers (with the exception of the guides) as she cannot "...speak for them or tell their story". What she dosen't come right out and tell you is that her portrayal of her fellow climbers is focused almost entirely on both their personal and mountaineering shortfalls. If we are to believe Ms. Kocour, she was the toughest, mentally and physically, the most skilled and the person with the fewest personality shortcomings. After elevating herself, she clearly had no choice but to change the names of her fellow climbers. My biggest problem with Facing the Extreme comes with the obvious lack of fact checking. Ms. Kocour states that Talkeetna is 70 miles from Anchorage, when it is approximately 114 miles. She also tells us that Denali is 250 miles from Talkeetna and the single engine Cessna made the flight to Denali Base Camp in 40 minutes, an obvious impossiblity. Denali is actually only 60 miles by road from Talkeetna. In addition, there are serious climbing factual errors as well, all the more shocking considering Ms. Kocour's oft repeated (in the text anyway) expertise. Ms. Kocour claims that while camped at high camp at 17,200 feet the climbers had now entered the "death zone". Actually, the "death zone" as it is known to climbers, begins at approximately 26,000 feet, nearly 9,000 feet higher than high camp on Denali. In fact, Base Camp on Mount Everest, where climbers spend close to 2 months at a time is at approximately 17,700 feet, some 500 feet higher that high camp on Denali. Ms. Kocour also states that she "...had been to 23,000 feet on Aconcagua", difficult to do since Aconcagua is 22,841 feet high, a seemingly small error, but an important distiction to climbers. If you want to spend money reading books by female climbers/explorers I suggest The Climb of my Life by Laura Evans, or Artic Daughter by Jean Aspen.

This book, though poorly written, has a story to tell, though it could have been better told by someone who knows how to write. It is, however, an easy, quick read and moderately interesting. It does have some merit, in as much as it chronicles the author's ascent of Denali.

Most of the book is spent recounting the time during which she and her team mates were trapped on Denali at 14,000 feet, caught in one of the most severe storms on record which saw eleven people perish. Her description of the horrendous weather conditions and sub zero temperatures, which pinned her team down for a period of about two weeks, is graphic, though repetitious. She was lucky to have been with two experienced guides who knew what they were doing. This is undoubtedly one of the main reasons she and her team mates survived their ordeal.

Disconcerting are her repeated racist references to Asian climbers. Her comments are unworthy and make her sound ignorant. It cannot help but affect one's opinion of her, and that opinion is unflattering. This is unfortunate, as she is a person one might otherwise admire for her pluck and stamina.

This is an as-told-to tale of enduring a ferocious storm for almost two weeks on North America's highest peak, Mt. Denali (Mt. McKinley). It is a tale worth telling for Denali, while not a technically difficult mountain to climb, is known for the worst storms on earth. The first problem is Ms. Kocour's exaggerations and misinformation diminishes the very story she wants to tell.

The second problem is Ms. Kocour herself. Her own words make her sound like an arrogant, bigoted,self-satisfied, braggart. Her lack of charity toward her teammates and fellow climbers is breathtakingly insensitive. She has a fawning regard for her professional guides and an almost girlish awe of chance meetings with elite climbers Jim Wickwire and John Roskelley, but a rare good word for her fellow amateurs.

The author continually refers to being trapped in the "Death Zone," a height where humans cannot acclimate to the altitude, and the human body deteriorates. This "Zone" is above 26,246 feet. The camp where the author was stranded was 8,000 feet below this extreme. To give a comparison, Everest's base camp (the beginning of the climb) is higher than the camp at which Ms. Kocour was stranded. The entire route her party took has fixed lines, and they were roped to their guides at all times during their climb. It was not what anyone would call an intrepid, daring ascent. The "ledge" where her team bivouacked accommodated six tents, a ranger hut and a large medical station, more resembling a mall parking lot than a ledge.

The descriptions of the storm are good, and it is easy to imagine the fear, the claustrophobia, and the boredom of being confined to such close quarters in the monstrous elements for such an extended period of time. It is a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks Denali is a walk in the park. It is not.

I awarded the second star for Ruth Anne's self-portrayal of a lady you'd love to see get her comeuppance. Makes you want to see a book by one of her teammates describing the trials and tribulations of climbing with Ruth Anne.

Yes the writing is terrible, (high school essay level I'd say). The dialog is appalling and I definitely could have lived without all the little detours into her personal past. What were her ghost writer and editor thinking? I am also quietly amazed her fellow clients didn't sue for defamation of character. However Ruth Ann's comments on Asian mountaineers merely reflect a widespread and often justified perception that Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese climbers take reckless chances - and all to often pay the price - not personal racism on her part. She also makes it quite clear that her expedition, dispite a close call or two with crevasses and running short on food, was never in serious danger - merely cold, hungry and generally miserable. Still, however safe one may be personally, it isn't pleasant to find oneself surrounded by death and disaster as she did. 'Facing the Extreme' is not a great addition to the literature of mountaineering. I dont plan to reread it and don't recomend it.

After reading "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer and "The Climb" by Anatoli Boukreev with G. Weston DeWalt, both of which were excellent and engaging books, I turned to "Facing the Extreme" by Ruth Anne Kocuour. Like Krakauer and Boukreev, Kocuour found herself high on a dangerous mountain in a blizzard. Like them, she survived, while others met their death. Unlike Krakauer and Boukreev, she did not write a great book about her experiences. The biggest problems with this book are the constant flow of bad jokes and puns, the constant put-downs of several of her climbing companions, and her total lack of modesty. Krakauer opines in his book that who lived and who died was a matter of chance, and that he could have easily died. Kocuour repeatedly tells the reader that it was her skill and planning that made her a survivor. I found her and her book to be obnoxious and less than entertaining.

I've been immersed in books of this genre in preparation for a class I'm planning to teach, and I have to say that this was one of the most annoying. Yes, the description of the storm and the deaths of other climbers is harrowing, but gosh. Ruth Anne is so impressed with herself that it's hard to get past her self-descriptions and appreciate the narrative. The others on her team (with the exception of her tentmate and the guides) are all unworthy of being there. The other teams on the mountain are all unworthy of being there. Everyone is either foolish, obnoxious, a danger to others, or just plain weak. But not Ruth Anne. She is the best climber, the best, most supportive tentmate, the most patient teammate. At the end, she quotes one of the guides as saying, "I'd climb with you anywhere." Maybe he would, but such self-serving comments are a distraction. As a comparison, read Roskelley's Nanda Devi. Equally harrowing, but Roskelley has no qualms about portraying himself as arrogant and impatient, and one can see how his presence on a team can be destructive. I wish Ruth Anne had been a bit more scrutinizing of herself. Or maybe she really is a mountaineering saint.

Poor Ruth Anne. She is bitter and unnecesarily contemptuous in many of the passages about her fellow climbers and I found her attitude to be nasty at best, not to mention immature. At one point, when describing the first time she met one of her teammates, she insulted his looks and called him "ugly." How shallow can a grown adult get? At any rate I gave it two stars because it is fairly interesting in that it is an account of the terrible storm she had the misfortune of being a part of. The writing is bad but then you have about twenty other reviews here which delve into this so I'll leave it alone. If you want to read some truly inspiring mountaineering stories check out some of these books: Minus 148 Degrees: The First Winter Ascent of Mt. McKinley by Art Davidson; Alaska Ascents, edited by Bill Sherwonit; Seven Summits by Dick Bass, Frank Wells, with Rick Ridgeway; High Exposure by David Breashears; The Last Step: The American Ascent of K2 by Rick Ridgeway; Everest: Southwest Face by Chris Bonington. There are many others but these are a great start.

Like another reviewer of Facing the Extreme, I had just read Krakauer's Into Thin Air and had to read more on mountain climbing. I choose Facing because of the title and because it was about one of "The Seven Summits".

Kocour portrays herself as an accomplished mountianeer, but imho her writing is far from accomplished.

I wished the book had included a good map so I could follow the progress of the group up the mounain. I also needed a Dramatis Personae. (I finally wrote-up my own.)

I was annoyed as Ms. Kocour's words revealed her over-idealization of the guides and her general contempt for the other climbers (except for her tent-mate). (It would be nice to read a book about the climb written by one of the others; I wonder how they saw her.)

Her writing imho is juvenile and, especially disconcerting, are the numerous (unintended, I assume) puns.

Still, I'm glad her friends et al encouraged her to write the book and overall I'm glad I read it. I know more about climbing than I did and more about Denali aka Mt. McKinley.

Before her next book, and I hope she writes again about her climbs, I hope she will enroll in a good basic writing class; one in which she will Face an Extreme(ly) rigorous teacher!

I really wanted to like this book. Most climbing accounts are written by superstars of the sport. Ms. Kocour's book held promise of an honest account of an amateur "weekend warrior". The struggle of a group of amateur climbers thrown together to climb Denali has all the elements of a superb human drama. Unfortunately, the depiction of the human spirit is perhaps the Mt. Everest of writing, and Ms. Kocour is not an Everest climber - in either the mountaineering or the literary sense. Her character development is one-dimensional at best. The guides are all-wise guardian angels whose cosmic connection to the mountain is boringly infallible. Her fellow clients are either hapless bumblers or selfish dolts who would run off in panic were it not for the heroic presence of the author. Ms. Kocour's dialogue is downright silly. She apparently equates crudity with authenticity, which perhaps accounts for her preoccupation with the many ways to defecate and urinate on the mountain. Upon her deliverance off the mountain, she gushes to her guide, "You did a great job of leading - a tribute to your family's storied mountaineering and guiding history". Do you think she really said that? Do you talk that way? Ms. Kocour compounds the problem by trying to portray her trip (and her role in it) as an astonishing mountaineering feat, which it was not. Sure, there was a bad storm, but while Ms. Kocour was spending several chapters admiring her own ability to sit in the tent waiting for her guides to cook her dinner, Park Service rangers and mountain rescue personnel were out in the teeth of the storm, working to help climbers. Their presence is barely acknowledged. Climbing Denali on a guided trip is a tremendous physical and mental challenge, and Ms. Kocour is right to be proud of it. However, her trip should not be confused with a right of passage to "serious" mountaineering. Any reasonably fit individual with three weeks and a few thousand dollars can sign on with any one of several excellent guide services to be led up the West Buttress of Denali. Hundreds of people do it every year. Ms. Kocour's very accomplished guides told the clients when to get up, what to carry, what direction to go and where to camp. The customers, including Ms. Kocour, followed their guide every day, tied in line to a rope. To assert, as Kocour does, that being led up the West Buttress of Denali along with two or three hundred other people qualifies her to climb Everest is the sort of hubris that has contributed to so many deaths on that mountain. All in all, this is just a bad book. It could have been the story of an individual's triumph over her own limits. Instead, it was a tiresome tribute by the author to herself. Were it not for the mass market success of Jon Krakauer's Everest account, this book would have been rightly relegated to the bargain bin. I won't even start on the editing

Kocur's descriptive writing is so good, I had to put on 2 wool sweaters, turn up the thermostat to 75 degrees F, and curl up in a blanket to get through her book. Krakauer writes well of the horror of failed mountain climbing, but Kocur seems to catch the essence of what it is like to be stranded in a fatal storm high up a mountain better.

The one truely off-putting part of this book is the dreadful proofreading. Typoes and "spellcheckos" are all too common, distracting from Kocur's prose. I can only hope that, some day, editors will go back to editing.

For me, as a woman, the most delightful part of the tale was how Kocur was treated as a woman. Once she got on the mountain, her gender seemed to be a non-issue, with one small exception. She did not make a big deal of this, and I found it refreshing to read a book about women and men where gender games didn't happen.

I give this book to my library patrons who liked Krakauer's _Into Thin Air_, those who read about women and those who enjoy well-told tales.