Read For Free Left For Dead: My Journey Home From Everest Brought To You By Beck Weathers Issued As Hardbound

not really get my attention but that was because I was most curious about what happened on the mountains but he did not really tell in detail.
Most of the book was about his life and how it changed him, Definitely not bad. I think I have been spoiled by Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air about the same accidents,.stars

As an editor, this book made my fingers itch, So much potential!

When I read Jon Krakauer's account of the same disaster"Into Thin Air"I was touched by the story of Beck Weathers, the mountaineer people kept leaving for dead who stubbornly survived anyway.
As soon I discovered he'd written his own story, I knew I had to read it, no matter how negative a lot of the reviews were.


Beck's brief account of his struggle to survive on Everest and his recovery afterwards are riveting, As other people have mentioned, they account for less than a third of this book, What his story is really about is how he decided to use the second chance he'd been given and become a different, better person.


Which I don't mind at allI find stories like Beck's very powerful, even inspirational, But there are aboutpages in the middle that I suspect have led to the majority of the complaints, as well as readers giving up on the story entirely.
How depression led Beck to grow more and more obsessed with mountain climbinginteresting, His preparations for and experience on Everestinteresting, The multiple surgeries he endured to put him back together and how he became a new man, literally and figurativelyinteresting, Even the backandforth with his wife about the challenges of their relationship were mildly interesting, What we did not need was the biography of his family tree, how his parents met, and a detailed account of the personalities of their two deceased cats.
At this point in the book, Beck was ramblingit felt like freeassociation writing, It's an easy fixwhy an editor or cowriter didn't catch it is beyond me, You could lift that chunk right out and have a much stronger book, with no one realizing anything is missing,

People have complained about the exchanges with his wife, "Peach, " For the most part I didn't have an issue with them, but when they became arguments on the page, it was a bit silly.
It cheapened Beck's story, IMO,

"It wasn't the depression, "
"Yes it was!"
"No!"
"Yes!"

Sigh,

That said, if you endure the soggy middle or skip through it, which is probably the wisest use of your time the first and last sections of this memoir are quite good.
And worth the read. Beck's humour, his incredible strength of character, and his tenacity are admirable, All in all, he tells a good story and he's a very likeable man,

He just needed a better editor, i really wish there was an option for halfstar reviews, because this is more of a twoampahalf star book for me.
i am being charitable because the book wasn't quite what i expected, amp although i was disappointed at first, i found the change in tone strangely refreshing.
plus you can read the entire book in like two hours, or, i did, anyway.

so this is another account of the mayeverest expedition that jon krakauer describes in into thin air.
if you are looking for a really exhaustive, detailed account of what happened when a blizzard descended upon the upper portion of mount everest on may, trapping at least a dozen climbers overnight without shelter, oxygen, food, water, or medical attention in the infamous "death zone," leading to several tragic deaths, krakauer's book is indispensable amp seriously compelling.
but one of the most compelling aspects of krakauer's book for me was the story of what happened to beck weathers.


krakauer amp weathers were team members attempting the summit together, led by seasoned mountaineer amp guide rob hall, krakauer succeeded in reaching the summit amp managed to make it back to high camp before being caught in the storm.
beck weathers was forced to abandon his summit attempt when the high altitude reacted badly with his surgically corrected vision, rendering him effectively blind on the mountain.
weathers agreed that it was be a suicide mission for him to attempt the summit with compromised vision, amp hall insisted that weathers wait on a ledge just above camp for hall's return from the summit, so that hall could guide weathers back to camp.
unfortunately, hall didn't start his descent from the summit until after the blizzard hit, amp he was slowed by another incredibly fatigued climber.
both hall amp the climber he stayed behind to assist froze to death in the storm, though weathers wouldn't know that until later.
as the day wore on amp darkness started to fall, along with the storm affecting travel up amp down the mountain, weathers knew he couldn't wait for hall amp had to find another way down the mountain.
he joined up with another group of struggling climbers from a fellow expedition, together, they reached the plateau where the tents were pitched, but in the whiteout, they found themselves walking in circles, increasingly in danger of walking right off the side of the mountain before finding camp.
they took shelter behind a small boulder amp tried to keep each other awake amp alive through the night, when the storm broke, the stronger climbers left for camp to recruit rescuers for the others, but when help came, weathers was one of two climbers who had fallen into a hypothermic coma.
although he was breathing, shallowly, there was no other sign of life amp the rescuers were forced to leave him for dead, since rescues at such a high altitude risk the lives of everyone involved in the rescue, amp the likelihood of survival after falling into a coma like that amp being in the elements for over twelve hours are almost zero.


astonishingly, weathers woke up from his coma, amp even though his eyes were frozen, he managed to guesstimate the route to camp amp stumbled in, a dead man walking.
he was rushed into a medical tent with hot water bottles amp sleeping bags, but his fellow climbers didn't expect him to live through the night.
but he did, amp he was able to climb mostly under his own power down to the ice fall, where he was rescued in the highest altitude helicopter evacuation ever.
he lost on arm halfway up to his elbow, amp all the fingers on the other hand, as well as some toes amp his nose, but.
. . he lived.

so that is the story i was expecting to read, amp i got that, but to stretch it out to booklength, weathers augmented it with some memoirish background about what drove him to climb mountains, the toll his hobby took on his family, recollections of other climbs he did before attempting everest, amp his lifelong struggle with depression.
it really wasn't what i was expecting, . . but i kind of appreciated it, since i struggle with depression too, i could relate to a lot of what he had to say, although it certainly did not motivate to take up mountaineering as a remedy.
the whole book kind of felt like a huge apology to his wife for risking his life over amp over again amp finally having to come within a hair's breadth of death before centering his family in his life amp trying to be a present husband amp father, but.
. . it would be difficult not to write something similar under those circumstances, weathers isn't a journalist like krakauer, amp he acknowledges that krakauer's book is the definitive account for the details of most of what happened on the mountain.
weathers offers a more personal account, without apportioning blame, amp it was pretty interesting, the dark humor sprinkled throughout was also a real treat, It's pretty rare that my opinion of a book changes dramatically over the course of reading it, Sure, a book that starts off well can turn out to be less interesting as time goes on, or a bad beginning can be saved by an increasingly good plot.
But it's far less common to be considering putting the book down permanently afterpages, then end up enjoying it immensely by the end.
Such was the case with “Left for Dead”, After the first third, I thought it was poorly written and expected the rest of the book to be boring filler.
As is turned out, it just keeps getting better and better, eventually turning into a quality read that I would recommend to almost anyone.


After reading “Into Thin Air” earlier this year, I was curious to read one of the multitude of other books written about theEverest disaster, in which over a dozen people were killed in a single day by a sudden storm.
Many of the those books were written in response to Krakauer's magazine article and book, which paints a fairly unflattering picture of some of the other climbers involved.
I wasn't too interesting in reading books about the back and forth of differing viewpoints and opinions on who did or did not do the right thing that day.
More appealing to me was “Left for Dead”, which is about the near miraculous survival of Beck Weathers, He had spent the entire duration of the storm laying in the snow, blind, frozen, and lost, When he was found the next day, he was still breathing but it was decided to leave him behind, The other climbers knew that physiologically he had no chance of survival and to attempt to rescue him would simply endanger the others.
Hours later, barely conscious, he walked back to camp himself, Still at extremely high altitude and near death, the other climbers again assumed that he would pass away during the night.
The next morning he insisted on walking further down the mountain with them, where he was eventually rescued by the highest altitude helicopter flight in history.


This story is related in the first hundred pages of the book, While the story itself is amazing and a true testament to the human will, the writing is simply subpar, Characters are introduced with barely a description then not mentioned again, the pacing of the adventure is all off, and the reader just doesn't get a good feel for what it was really like up there unlike in Krakauer's book, where the descriptions make you feel like you're on the mountain yourself.
Most surprisingly of all, after the firstpages of apage book, the Everest story is over! “What a rip off!”, I thought, where's my adventure story I was already mentally preparing my negative review.
When the following chapter started to detail his early life, I felt that the book was just going

to keep getting worse.


Instead, it got a whole lot better, Weathers, his family, and friends all give personal, first person accounts of their lives leading up the expedition to Everest, The story of survival is amazing, but it becomes even more fascinating as a story about an individual, a human with flaws just like everyone else.
This wasn't some athletic superhero up there Weathers was a man suffering from depression and a danger obsession that was ruining his marriage and family.
By telling the story of his life and especially his relationship with his wife which at times is brutally honest and open the reader starts to see the human context his which the events on Everest took place.
This makes the story vastly more interesting, and Weathers' survival on Everest becomes just one part of a wonderful redemption story.


If you go into this book, as I did, expecting to read “Into Thin Air” from a different perspective, then you will be disappointed.
On the other hand, if you are interested in a book about real people struggling with their demons and the power of life and death situations to change lives, read “Left for Dead”.
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