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kyatic's review
4.0
This book somehow took me 4 months to read, largely because, despite being a book about a man who gets smushed by an avalanche and breaks his pelvis and has to crawl miles and miles to safety, it was actually rather dry. Unlike Ken Jones, who spends most of the book being various degrees of damp. Compared to other survival books, like Touching The Void (also about a man who breaks his pelvis and has to crawl miles and miles to safety, which is clearly a surprisingly rich genre, except that dude also has to climb out of a glacier) this one isn't written with quite the same exhilirating prose which makes you unable to stop turning the pages. It's interesting, in the voyeuristic and schadenfreude sort of way that all these survival memoirs inevitably are, but it's not particularly gripping.
HOWEVER, that said, four stars for this paragraph alone:
'Each rise [of icy water] caused me to breathe in sharply, my teeth started chattering and my balls ached horribly.'
GOOD GOD MAN, you've been hit by an avalanche, shattered your pelvis and your leg, haven't eaten anything except soggy sausage roll crumbs for days, and now you're hopping through an icy river with only a stick to bear your weight, and yet you're STILL thinking about your testicles? An absolute icon.
HOWEVER, that said, four stars for this paragraph alone:
'Each rise [of icy water] caused me to breathe in sharply, my teeth started chattering and my balls ached horribly.'
GOOD GOD MAN, you've been hit by an avalanche, shattered your pelvis and your leg, haven't eaten anything except soggy sausage roll crumbs for days, and now you're hopping through an icy river with only a stick to bear your weight, and yet you're STILL thinking about your testicles? An absolute icon.
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