Customer Reviews

Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the opening recollection to the last sentence, Macfarlane's history of how mountains have been imagined left me aching to read more. The final words took me by surprise; I fully expected to turn the page for at least a few more spellbinding paragraphs. While the author's own experiences with altitude, ice, and snow are interspersed throughout, this is not at all a flimsy excuse to offer up a personal memoir or a coming-of-age story. Rather, his own stories effectively illustrate his larger points. The final problem of the plot, Mallory's fatal ascent toward the summit of Everest, lingers throughout as the essential riddle, and yet Macfarlane skillfully avoids letting that tragedy overwhelm the rest of the book. Every historical nuance, every detail of landscape, every observation of human endeavor is crafted through the comprehension of one who is sensitive to his own place in the historical development he chronicles. It is difficult not to recall Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams as far as the depth of understanding and the quality of the writing.

I live in Colorado, and spend a lot of my spare time in the mountains. As a result, I've got into mountain literature in a big way. I've read a bunch of the great mountain works: Joe Simpson's Touching the Void and Maurice Herzog's Annapurna among them, also some stuff by Jon Krakauer (Eiger Dreams and Into Thin Air).

I'd add this book to that list immediately, which I bought because I saw an advert for it in Harpers.Unlike most mountain books, it's not a straight story of an expedition. Instead, Macfarlane moves back and forth within time, writing about how people through history have "fallen in love with mountains". He also writes - and this is what tops the book out for me - about his own experiences in the mountains. The attention he pays to the landscape, and the way he writes about snow and ice, really spoke to me. Don't read this book if you want gung-ho stories of endurance: go to it for philosophy and beauty. 5 stars; bring on the next one.

We humans seem to have an unquenchable thirst for vicarious danger. Mountains of the Mind in not just an adventure tale, however; it's also an essay-like exploration of our fascination with these nearly unattainable high places that have for so long provided inspiration and insight. Mountains are difficult to write about without resorting to clichés, but Macfarlane manages to wax eloquent without overwhelming us with his considerable descriptive powers.
Almost makes me want to go climb a mountain...

Just think that mountains were once seen as the wild pimples of the world, good for nothing blemishes, protruding from the arable and the habitable.

Macfarlane traces the change in attitude in Western conception of the mountains and how they became places to aspire to, to reflect upon, to escape to, to die for.

Macfarlane's personal climbing stories nicely intersesct with the historical narrative as he tries to find those key moments in time which changed things, and how interesting it is to see poets like Petrarch and Coleridge playing major parts in this transformation.

The growing appeal of the other-world, of places like Mount Blanc are beautifully described but I didn't think it needed the whole last chapter devoted to Mallory and Everest.

This book is eminently readable, detailed and interesting, and freely admits it owes more than a little to Schama's 'Lanscape and Memory'.

Robert MacFarlane's book is the most original take on Mountains I have ever read. MacFarlane's book examines how our view of MOuntains has changed over the centuries. Today we regard them as things we have mastered but three hundred years ago they were regarded as fearful places ... a bit of hell on earth. He describes how our geological and cultural view of them evolved as science replaced superstition as the basis for knowledge of these places. He uses loads of interesting anecdotes to illustrate his story as well as personal reminiscence ... he's an amateur climber. He is also a dream of a writer. I usually devour books ... but this one was so original and so well written that t took me a couple of weeks ... I wanted to savour it in small bites excellent reading for a vacation in the mountains -- or the beach.

I have read the edition entitled "Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination," an English 2004 Granta Publication bought in Kathmandu. This is an interesting series of essays following the development and transitional phases of Western European conceptions of the "mountains" and exploring the mountains. In fact, that is my biggest warning about the book. MacFarlane never comes to terms with his Eurocentric, indeed Anglo-centric conception of mountains. And this really limits the book. Yes, it is interesting to read about now the mountains changed, from an British perspective, from a place to fear to one where fear was courted as a test of character, and an affirmation of life itself.

But other cultures, such as where I live in Nepal, have been living in the mountains for centuries before what is essentially an Enlightenment project - scaling the heights of the world as a humanist exploration of identity - starts to occur. Buddhist monks, travellers and other explorers have been travelling and living at great heights in the Himalaya for, well we don't know how long. But caves used by lamas and pandits dot the high areas of the Himalayas as do gompas (Buddhist temples). Caves have been found in Upper Mustang dating back over 2000 years. Milarepa, the Buddhist sage, lived in a cave near the Gangapurna glacier above Manang, Annapurna Himal, over 700 years ago. And as a lot of MacFarlane's book deals with people travelling and exploring the mountains, not just climbing them, the omissions of the world's true high mountain cultures, that of not just the peoples of the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindu Kush, but also the Andes and East Africa needs addressing. Likewise, while he addresses the Hudson School and other American landscape painters of the 19th century, he never attempts to explain the mountain ontology of the mountain men and other Western North American explorers of the 19th century, which included peak climbers as well.

MacFarlane's typically British obsession with Mallory and Irvine just re-iterates the mythopoetic obsession with this climber and three '20's expeditions. There were plenty of other climbers around then and shortly after who arguably had as much impact if not more on the history of mountaineering: Shipton and Tilman's explorations of the Himalaya, Sven Hedin, the German Nanga Parbat Expeditions of the '30's, the American K2 Expeditions of the '30s, and also Swiss, German and Austrian conceptions of the Alps from the Middle Ages onwards. I'm not saying he should have included all of this - but the title and text of MacFarlane's book need to address the Anglocentric exclusivity of his focus.

There are many other books to look at on how humans live in, encounter and think about the mountains - Marco Pallis' "Peaks and Lamas," David Snellgrove's "Four Lamas of Dolpo" are two that come to mind. But the more important point is that both Hinduism and Buddhism have viewed the Himalayas in general, and certain peaks in specific, as places that are the font of human and spiritual experience. MacFarlane cursorily scoffs at religion and dismisses its role in explaining mountains (aside from a few mentions of Sherpas and Buddhists), perhaps because the omission of said subjects in this book is so glaring that the only way he can hope to salvage his book is to pretend that these white elephants don't exist.

Apparently alot. The idea that the physical world is created to a certain extent by our perceptions of it is a very important philosophical idea. In this book we are treated to a fascinating demonstration of this idea with regard to western and British notions of mountains and mountain climbing over the last 4 centuries. These ideas are very mixed up with notions of how the earth was created and has evolved geologically and glacially over the centuries. If you are still wondering how to bridge the gap between the biblical account of creation and more modern understanding of the history of this planet, this book may help.. Of course, I don't imagine that most people who pick up this book will be expecting to gain an insight into matters such as this, but that doesn't make what Macfarlane teaches us about mountains, mountain climbing and matters of perception any less fascinating.. I'm not at all disapointed in this book and I can see some interesting uses of it and I am only half through..I was glad to find out that Macfarlane has written another book on "the wild places" in England and Ireland, and I may well seek that one out as well when the time is right.. Brilliant in lot of ways! I just hope that the author keeps most of his fingers and toes, for many years to come..

In this book, MacFarlane tries to trace the process by which humans - - well, European humans - - came to view mountains as places of beauty, glory, and adventure. He doesn't succeed in giving us an answer but he provides a lot of stories, and a little history, on these thems.

He builds the story around themes such as scientific research into geology, glaciers, and the nature of time; fear and adrenaline; fascination with altitude; and the joys of walking off the map into uncharted regions. The final substantive chapter is a narrative of George Mallory's attempts on Everest, written as a single coherent story that works very nicely.

In contrast to the Everest chapter, most of book is a collection of relatively short essays, bundled as chapters. Each essay one is about the length of a newspaper or magazine article, and they seem to have been recycled from MacFarlane's contributions to these kinds of outlets. This makes each chapter a collection of essays around a theme. When it works, it can be thought-provoking. Unfortunately, MacFarlane doesn't make major points or build an argument around these themes, leaving unanswered the great question of mountaineering (and of this book): why?

MacFarlane also mixes personal anecdotes with the other essays. As he confesses in the acknowledgments section at the end, his editor made him do this. I'm afraid that this is how they read, too, as inserted bits rather than as coherent parts of each chapter. They also unfold in a strange way, with MacFarlane hiking up a Scottish peak in one but helicoptering up a glacier in the Tian Shian later in the book - - only gradually does the reader realize that the author is a serious mountaineer. Late in the book I came to expect these anecdotes and was then surprised to read the Everest chapter, which doesn't have one. (Apparently, he hasn't been up Everest yet.) All in all, I don't think these anecdotes worked in their current form.

Though the book is weak on overall structure and coherence, the essays and vignettes are actually pretty enjoyable. MacFarlane writes well, and it's easy to see why he's been able to place a lot of articles in the papers. If that's what you're looking for, it's a good read.

Fortunately, this is not yet another egotistical man-against-the-mountain book in the style of Joe Simpson et.al. Rather, this book purports to be an exploration of the fascination with mountains that came to grip the Western mind-set. Therefore it is more of a cultural history of climbing than a pure 'tale of adventure'.

Macfarlane has obviously researched his subject thoroughly. Unfortuately, this shows due to the fact that there is so much in here that is not really required - more than once an addition read as though the author had come across yet another quote he found interesting and just `had to' shoe-horn it into the book. Therefore we have endless references to people like Keats, who himself was never really into climbing mountains, but happened to say something about them. ... There is a lot of interest in this book, but you have to read through repetitive sections to get to them. There is also a lot of reliance on quotes - again and again we get someone saying 'Itis impossible to describe....' then attempting to describe it. It gets a bit boring after awhile, leaving this reader champing at the bit to get to the next chapter.

The inclusion of personal anecdotes is also a bit dry. I don't have anything against books where a historical/scientific and/or cultural exploration is interspersed with personal narrative or anecdotes. But these anecdotes seem to jump all over the place: perhaps they would have been much more useful if the author had referred to one climbing trip throughout, using examples from this to underline the points he is making. And the section on Mallory doesn't fit: I realise that the author is using him as an example of the ideas he has been exploring throughout the book, but really it is just a potted history. He continues to comment on the fact that Mallory was drawn to Everest, even though he knew there was a good chance that he wouldn't come back, and despite the fact he had a wife he loved very much and wanted to spend time with. Yet we never quite get an explanation of why, which was ultimately meant to be the point, I thought.

Not sure what market this book is trying to reach - if someone picks it up to read about climbing adventures, I think they will be bored quite quickly. If they are looking for an in-depth cultural history of climbing, they might find this book a bit `bitty'. Which is a shame, as this is a book that obviously has had a lot of work put into it, and there are some very interesting ideas contained in it. If only you didn't have to wade through so much extraneous material to get there.