Customer Reviews

Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Chip Brown is an exceptionally gifted writer. His prose is fluid, inventive, full of literary allusion and smart. In Good Morning Midnight he has turned his attention to the planned suicide of Guy Waterman, a famous mountaineer and outdoorsman, who froze himself to death one desperately frigid night in February 2000 atop a mountain in the New Hampshire wilderness. Although the book is biographical in the sense that it explores Waterman's life in toto, the central preoccupation is most definitely the motivational matrix of the choice to die made by a sixty-seven year-old man who was in relatively good health for his age and who enjoyed a rich life well worth continuing with in the eyes of those who knew and loved him. Why does a person make the choice of death? Is it a legitimate choice? What life circumstances eventuate in such a choice? How does the choice affect surviving family and friends? These are the questions Brown relentlessly wrestles with throughout his study. Along with the question of whether medical/psychiatric intervention would have made a difference in the final outcome. As a biography of a unique, multi-talented man Good Morning Midnight held my interest until the last page. I particularly liked Brown's attention to Waterman's two eldest sons who died (killed themselves?) in the Alaskan wilderness both before they were thirty years of age. The chapter devoted to middle son John Waterman, a famous climber in his own right, was absolutely riveting and marked the high point of the book in this reader's opinion. Brown posits that for Guy Waterman it was the loss of two of his three boys, and the remorse he felt about his role in their untimely demise, that ultimately drove him to consider his life not worth living. But there is so much speculation and hand wringing about motivation that after a while it became a chore to follow along with this layer of the text. I especially found Brown's concern with whether or not Waterman was clinically depressed and in need of treatment tiresome. Just because it is possible to 'treat' does not mean that we all must choose to be cured. Not everyone desires the intrusion of medical attention under all circumstances just because it is available. And not every bit of every individual's life need necessarily be understood down to every minute fragment of the psyche's intricate web of meaning and motivation. As Waterman's wife Laura wrote after the death of her husband, "Why rend the veil?" Amen! The idea that we must all live to the very last possible moment of our lives regardless of the quality of those lives is an overbearing injunction that has led to many of the problems of modern society, not the least of which is the all too pervasive, frequently gruesome hospitalization of death. Waterman led a full life and his death was thematically consonant with the overarching trajectory of that life. Although he made mistakes that came to haunt him in his later years, his choice to die at the moment he was ready to go seems a courageous act that might well be respected on its own terms rather than dissected ad nauseum by those without the fortitude to recognize that we are each and every one of us heading for the same destination and that it is the act of taking responsibility for our final station in life that quintessentially defines who we are and what we are in fact really made of. Whatever his shortcomings, Guy Waterman was made of the stuff of legend. May he rest in peace.

I have long been a fan of Guy Waterman - the sort of man that many admire but few emulate. His wilderness ethic was beyond reproach in an era where few mountaineers could make the same claim. Bits and pieces of his family story have been told in article and essay format by such writers as Jon Waterman and John Krakauer. And of course, we are left with several collections by Guy Waterman himself. To that collection we can add this confused book, which seeks to be part Greek tragedy, part love story, mystery, part cautionary tale. In the end, it is only partially successful and the attempts at clinical psychology come across as particularly muddy and new-agey. The frequent asides early in the book caused me to put it down multiple times. Also, we spend much more time trying to get into Waterman's head than we do getting into his beloved home mountain ranges.

The first half of the book attempts to make a mystery out of something completely obvious - why Waterman would take his own life. In the end Guy Waterman was a man who chose to live his values. Rare in the world, to be sure. So it is not at all unusual that he would choose to die by those values, as well. Fortunately, the author backs off from this angle in the second half of the book, the narrative improves dramatically, and the book becomes more difficult to set aside. It becomes a father and sons book, touching and revealing, only occasionally bothered by high-reaching prose.

As a resident of Fairbanks, Alaska, I am familiar with Johnny Waterman's legend. By exploring the lives of Guy Waterman and his family, this book provides a very insightful analysis of the family's history and relationships. The book shows a keen understanding of the psychology of mountaineers and those who love the frontier and outdoors. It examines the connection of life and death, the connection of hope with despair and the internal conflicts of one man that eventually led to his taking his own life.

What is special about Mr. Brown's biography of Guy Waterman, is that he refuses to paint a picture of pathology. Instead he describes Mr. Waterman as unique and grand in all his eccentricities and human frailties. Here is a man who is connected to wilderness in a spiritual way yet remains existentially alone and unable to connect with his own children in an enduring way.

This book is a page-turner, a psychological and philosophical thriller that had me mesmerized from beginning to end.

I found Mr. Brown's grasp of Alaskan wilderness accurate. He knows Denali and the Ruth Glacier in a personal way. He respects the power of wilderness without impressing his ego on it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves memoirs, wilderness and psychological mystery.

I had read an article about Guy Waterman some time ago and was anxious to know more about him. So, when I learned of Chip Brown's book, I was eager to read it. At the end, I was frustrated. I wanted to know how Waterman LIVED his life; Brown was intent on focusing entirely on why he chose to DIE. Brown makes clear that Waterman was enormously respected and loved by many people. But he fails to explore his relationships with anyone other than his family. Waterman was the legendary man of the mountains in New Hampshire, but Brown tells us very little of why that was true - other than telling us how many times he climbed all the 4,000'+ peaks and writing some books about them, books he describes only very cursorily.
Waterman and his second wife, Laura, chose to live, like Helen and Scott Nearing, a very basic, really primitive lifestyle back in the woods in Vermont, but again Brown describes their lives only minimally.
I love mountains and forests. I love hard physical effort (I was a serious, competitive long distance runner for more than 40 years until arthritis stopped me.) Like the Watermans, I hate the materialistic way of life favored by almost all Americans. And, like Guy Waterman, I completely believe that a person should have the choice of when to exit this world, if old age and decreptitude make life not worth living.
In short, this should have been a made-to-order book for me. But I became weary of Brown's endless psycho-analyzing of Waterman, and in time I skimmed the psycho-babble, looking for the occasional passages which provided information about how he - and Laura - actually lived.
Ironically, Brown failed in the one task he assigned himself - to give a clear explanation for Waterman's suicide. Yes, he couldn't do all he had once done, but he still was very fit, fit enough to climb to the top of that mountain in brutal winter cold to end his life. And he left behind - DESERTED - a woman he seemed clearly to love greatly. Why did so many love such a man?

After just finishing the book I found myself wanting to write the author and thank him for letting the reader into another world, a very personal one, of a man who had experienced so much in the ways of life, love, and death. The book flows with it's constant references to Guy Waterman's own writings as well as great literary works. I felt a part of the waterman clan ,without intruding, after reading the book. It has been a long time since a book made anything so real with out being too heavy handed. The adventures are amazing, both in the outdoors and with the human emotions. A fantastically orchestrated work; Chip Brown has proved himself as an outdoorsman and writer.

This very artfully told tale was truly page turner for me. Thick with literary references, Brown's story of Guy Waterman reflects the complexity of a multi-talented individual, appreciated by many, but omniouly least of all by himself.

I came away with a very strong feeling that Guy Waterman was truly a unique individual. His successes far outweighed his failures. But his ultimate failure was to recognize that hardmen mature into wisemen. Old Men of the Mountain types, who regale their friends and cohorts with lessons and values of challenging and living amongst the mountains. No matter how far flung the challenge, a mountaineer's ultimate objective is to return from his/her adventure to share the experience; the cold, the hard breathing, the colors, the wind and their intimate feelings of wonder or survival. Regretfully, Guy's inner-self, his demons, contested his own outwardly generous, steadfast and friendly personality.

For me, Brown's story reacquainted me with several names and places familiar in mountaineering circles. It also cleard my long held confusion between John Waterman the highly acclaimed, albeit daring alpinist, Guy's son and Jonathan Waterman the prolific author of Alaskan mountaineering.

HOWEVER, as an end note the publisher editorial and Author INCORRECTLY stated that Krakauer wrote about John Waterman. The book Into the Wild was the story of Chris McCandless, by J.Krakauer.

If Chip Brown could have kept himself out of this book for more than two pages (exaggeration), I would be nudging it up one or two stars. He does an excellent job of recounting Waterman's life and death, and the effect of both on the people around him. The description of Waterman's homestead, named Barra, in East Corinth, VT is compelling and when he sticks to the action and details of any event or subject, the pages turn by themselves. What irked me throughout was the constant first person references that broke the spell of Brown's otherwise great storytelling.

The first few chapters almost turned me off completely with Brown's constant self-reference and judgemental asides about the nature of Waterman's suicide. This was a story waiting to be shown, not told - to break out a dusty but still fundamental edict. Mr. Brown blows his assignment: "When I got up to leave Lou Cornell's farmhouse, I was no clearer about the meaning of Waterman's life and death, but I knew about the hold they had, the story-ness of what happend." Then why not just give us the story?

The effect of Brown name-checking himself is jarring right up until the end of the book. Late in the pages he has us wound up and, even though we know how the story turns out, we read the words like they were Waterman's last steps up Old Bridle Path. The last hike of this man's life is unfolding before us. It is great stuff. And then, in the middle of the hike, when another hiker sees Waterman heading up and recoginzes that he has an exceptionally long ice axe for that kind of trek - you can hear the clang: "'It was at least a hundred centimeters,' he told me over the phone."

What are the words "me", "told" and "phone" doing in that sentence?

Mucking it up is what.

I had found the films 'Into the Wild' and 'Grizzly Man' very interesting; then I stumbled upon this, after reading a piece by Chip Brown in the NY Times.
It is fortunate for me that my interest was founded on Mr. Waterman's suicide; the strength of the book is the food for thought that helped me come to my own understanding of it.
In his preparations to exit, Mr. Waterman showed, beyond good style, some real consideration to those he left behind. It appears that his early trial and error years put him in a situation that later haunted him owing to the early lonely mountaineering deaths of his two sons and the inescapable sense that there was a failure on his part as a father.

If Chris McCandless fell under the spell of 'Call of the Wild', Waterman may have embodied Ivanhoe, at least to his two sons. Instead of jousts, the murderous mountains test and certify heroes.

The homestead years were a sort of artwork, really. Work, work, work; all the more redeeming because hard; and still some mountaineering.

But if your life is about independence, and feeling respected counts for something, old age can be problematical.

Interestingly, it was reported that he took two objects with him on his way to his appointed death, mementos of his sons; they were not found on him after his death. I think he decided to reject what that might symbolize. I suspect he had to admit that his final act merely underlined his philosophy, suggested by the phrase 'better free in hell than serving in heaven'.

Johnny Waterman is a legend in Fairbanks, Alaska. Examining the life of his father, Guy Waterman, and his brothers and extended family gives an insightful analysis of their interactions, history and relationships. The book shows a keen understanding of the psychology of mountaineers and those who love the frontier and outdoors. It examines the connection of life and death, the connectin of hope with despair, and the internal conflicts of one man that eventually led to his taking his own life. Tragically, it also gives one insight as to the deaths of two of his three sons.

What is unique about Mr. Brown's biography of Guy Waterman, is that he refuses to pathologize Guy Waterman. Instead, he paints him as a unique character, grand in his eccentricities and human frailties. He is a man connected to wilderness in a spiritual way yet remains existentially alone and unable to connect with his own children in any enduring way. For much of his life he remains estranged from them.

This book is a page-turner, a psychological and philosophical thriller that had me mesmerized from beginning to end.

I found Mr. Brown's grasp of Alaskan wilderness accurate. He knows Denali and the Ruth Glacier in a personal way. He respects the power of wilderness. I recommend this book to anyone interested in wilderness, memoirs, mountaineering, and psychological mystery.

I thought this book was very well done. It was always interesting and presents its subjects (the Watermans) in a decent light. I think that as an author of a subject like this it would be easy to cast judgement on Guy Waterman, but Chip Brown lets the reader come to thier own conclusions. I really enjoyed this book, and I believe that C. Brown did a good job in showing the complexity of the situations the Watermans encountered.