Fall Of the Phantom Lord: Climbing and the Face of Fear [Hardcover]

Andrew Todhunter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 1998

In 1989, while attempting a new route on a difficult overhanging rock face, climber Dan Osman fell. Again and again, protected by the rope, he fell. He decided then that it would not be in climbing but in falling that he would embrace his fear--bathe in it, as he says, and move beyond it.

A captivating exploration of the daredevil world of rock climbing, as well as a thoughtful meditation on the role of risk and fear in the author's own life.

In the tradition of the wildly popular man-versus-nature genre that has launched several bestsellers, Andrew Todhunter follows the lives of world-class climber Dan Osman and his coterie of friends as he explores the extremes of risk on the unyielding surface of the rock.

Climbing sheer rock faces of hundreds or thousands of feet is more a religion than a sport, demanding dedication, patience, mental and physical strength, grace, and a kind of obsession with detail that is crucial just to survive. Its artists are modern-day ascetics who often sacrifice nine-to-five jobs, material goods, and the safety of everyday life to pit themselves and their moral resoluteness against an utterly unforgiving opponent.

In the course of the two years chronicled in Fall of the Phantom Lord, the author also undertakes a journey of his own as he begins to weigh the relative value of extreme sports and the risk of sudden death. By the end of the book, as he ponders joining Osman on a dangerous fall from a high bridge to feel what Osman experiences, Todhunter comes to a new understanding of risk taking and the role it has in his life, and in the lives of these climbers.

Beautifully written, Fall of the Phantom Lord offers a fascinating look at a world few people know. It will surely take its place alongside Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm as a classic of adventure literature.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dan Osman risks his life as a matter of course. While on the ground he shuffles simply enough from ad hoc carpentry gigs to loosely defined relationships, dodging cops along the way in a crummy, unregistered pickup. But get him on some obscenely vertical rock, and he becomes a high priest of climbing aesthetes. For two years, Atlantic Monthly columnist Andrew Todhunter followed the Tahoe-area climber and his band of devotees, limning the sublime riches enjoyed by some of the sport's most earnest practitioners. Such riches come at a cost, and a lesser writer could hardly ask us to understand the rationale behind "putting up" challenging new routes that sometimes require months of painstaking work, scaling frozen ice floes in the dark of night, and leaping hundreds of feet from windy bridge buttresses with merely a rope and harness to arrest the fall.

But Todhunter pulls it off. In prose that is as exacting as the rock and as graceful as a fine-tuned route, he miraculously transforms Osman's avocation into a reasonable and even artistic profession. The detailed climbing sequences make for compulsive reading, and the author's evocations of Osman's craft will convince even the most ardent flatlander of the endeavor's inherent sanity. What's more, once off the steep pitches, we glimpse a young man strangely vulnerable: trying to win extra cash from sponsors, cobbling together a nontraditional family life, and struggling to maintain his eminence in a sport in which the envelope is pushed further every day.

More than a profile of a climber and his métier, though, Fall of the Phantom Lord is also a personal meditation on fear and its management. Each move in a serious climber's shoes represents the possibility of sudden harm, and for the free climber--the true ascetic in the bunch--a bad mistake up high is almost certainly fatal. Reflecting on his own daredevil past, Todhunter measures the moral obligations of adulthood--and in his case, approaching fatherhood--against the satisfaction of outmaneuvering fate. Into the narrative he seamlessly interweaves tales of his extreme pursuits and near-death experiences (motorcycle wrecks, scuba diving miscues, and abandoned mountaineering expeditions). Pondering a rope jump with Osman, the author discovers he cannot shrug off his responsibilities: "Part of me wants to shake [Osman], to shout, 'You've got a daughter, man! Wake up!' ... I try to remember why I jumped from the cliff at Cave Rock, and the emotion--the extraordinary clarity--that it left me with, but I cannot. And part of me wonders, 'What happened? How did I become afraid?'" While he cannot fully resolve this conflict, Todhunter goes a long way toward delineating the lure of danger for those who chase it. --Langdon Cook

From Publishers Weekly

A "fledgling alpinist" who writes on extreme sports for the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines, Todhunter set out in the mid 1990s to explore a tiny culture of rock climbers who choreograph free falls from dangerously high places. At its center was Dan Osman, a world-class climber who holds the record for free-falling and whose personality yields few handholds. Todhunter nevertheless manages to weave a complex story around this elusive subject, blending accounts of climbing with Osman in varied terrain with other travel and high-altitude memories while giving vent to his own conflicted feelings about the danger of such activities. When Todhunter undertakes a free fall from a 100-foot cliff supported only by climbing gear, he finds that "a part of me had not survived the jump, as if something small and shameful had remained behind... for a short while I had a glimpse of what it meant to be free." But as he and his wife contemplate having a child, he asks himself: "At what point... do statistically hazardous, entirely elective pastimes become unethical?" Although Todhunter's determination to get to the heart of his subjects' passion is well articulated, it is not contagious. At times, the book is redeemed by its crisp reportage and the author's empathetic self-questioning. But in too many moments?as when he explains the entire climbing rating system or aborts an attempt at the summit of California's Mount Shasta?Todhunter's narrative loses so much velocity that, ultimately, it may fail to hook even the armchair mountaineer.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st Anchor Books ed edition (August 3, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385486413
• ISBN-13: 978-0385486415
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,318,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating, simple man worth reading about, May 14, 2000

By 

R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fall of the Phantom Lord: Climbing and the Face of Fear (Paperback)

I became fascinated with mountain climbing after reading about the Everest climbs. This book was even better. Osman is a fascinating individual completely consumed with rock climbing. His feats of free-fall are bizarre and will leave you mezmerized. But if you test fate too much, bad things happen.

While rock climbing is the center of this book, Osman was more than a climber. It's interesting to a guy who works at least 8 hours a day to read about a man who works only to support his "rock climbing habit". Osman was also a unique individual and I feel for his daughter having to grow up without this unique individual in her life.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvelous, February 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Fall of the Phantom Lord: Climbing and the Face of Fear (Paperback)

This is one of my all-time favortie adventure books, and I've read many, both modern and classic. Todhunter's book is a marvelous excursion into the realm of fear and adrenaline, poignant and poetic, the inside story on what is otherwise external in nature, i.e. risking your life for mysterious reasons. Anyone who has ever taken seemingly foolish risks should rush out and get this book!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly descriptive. It kept me on the edge of my seat., February 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Fall Of the Phantom Lord: Climbing and the Face of Fear (Hardcover)

Though I am not an avid climber and sadly never had the opportunity to see Osman in action, Todhunter described Osman's psyche in such a way that I really felt that I came to know this courageous, reckless, inspiring climber. So much so, that when I learned of Osman's death in Yosemite last November, I literally cried. Todhunter introduced me to a man who, rather than running from his fear, literally jumped into its arms. We should all learn to be so courageous. I highly recommend this book.