Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest by Beck Weathers
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Book Reviews of Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest
Book Review: Left for Dead
Summary: 5 Stars
I wanted to read the different views of the various writers who wrote about the 1996 ascent of Everest. After reading Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which is supposed to be the definitive account of the tragedy which took place on the 1996 ascent, I was curious to read the accounts of the same event told be other people who were there. This book (Left for Dead) was one of them and I found it interesting not so much as an alternative account of what happened but as the personal journey of one person and how he was changed as a result of what happened to him.Book Review: Beck Weathers survival on Everest
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a very interesting and heartfelt book about Beck Weathers and his family and the effect that his mountain climbing had on their life. When he was in serious trouble and thought to be dead on the mountain, he made several promises to himself about his family and he has followed through. A sad tragedy with his wife's brother cemented his agenda and he and his family are now in better shape. This book is very touching and I recommend that anyone who followed the tragic events on Mount Everest in 1996 add this to their library.Book Review: RE: Mt Everest
Summary: 5 Stars
As one of the other reviewers had written, I too have becme nearly obsessed with the events surrounding the tragic events of May 1996. I have read every book I can find on the subject.
Dr. Weathers book is very well written. It gives perspective from his wife and friends view as they waited his return and the sadness and then apprehension when they find he is still alive but in dire trouble.
I'd highly recommend this book. it is inspirational - his courage - his acceptance of what happened.
Book Review: For me, it helped me with my challenge
Summary: 5 Stars
7 years ago , I was diagnosed with non hodgkins lymphoma, and not curable, I read this book 5 years ago in the peak of my mental struggle, it was a turning point for me, I empathized with Beck, am I going to die?, or walk down that Mountain, even when he walked into the camp he was written off, only he knew he would survive, after reading this book my fear went away of my own mortality. That is what this book did for me, I am happy to report I remain in remmission.Book Review: Glad I read it -
Summary: 4 Stars
"I searched all over the world for that which would fulfill me, and all along it was in my own backyard." That's how Beck Weathers sums up what his harrowing Everest adventure taught him.
If you're looking for suspense, look elsewhere. The facts of the 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest are well known, and Dr. Weathers (a Texas pathologist) tells his own climb's story in his book's first section. This is one man's personal memoir, not a mountaineering book, and I knew that when I bought it. His reasons for wanting to summit Everest were entirely unlike pioneer climber George Mallory's famous, "Because it is there." For Dr. Weathers this was one more way to insulate himself from the growing pain of living.
What could make such an outwardly successful human being feel that way about his life? Beck Weathers had it all, and not just the material things that a partner in a thriving medical practice can afford for himself and for his family. He also had a loving wife, two healthy and gifted children, a host of friends, and a supportive extended family. Yet this brilliant and charismatic man could not bring himself to believe that these people really did love him, and wanted his company. Nor could he allow himself to enjoy theirs, because in his mind he did not deserve happiness. He deserved, instead, the kind of punishment that extreme sports inflict.
The enormous gap between Beck's world as he perceived it through the filter of chronic depression, and Beck's world as it really was, closed when he to all intents and purposes froze to death on Mount Everest. Opening his eyes after hours of lying out in a blizzard, left for dead not once but twice by comrades unable to carry him to safety, was his first miracle. Getting off the mountain alive was his second, after the Base Camp doctors responded to news of his revival by telling those trying to care for him after he stumbled into camp horribly frostbitten: "He is going to die. Do not bring him down." The third miracle, though, is the greatest one. Beck Weathers held onto his near-death epiphany. He believed the truths he'd finally glimpsed, and used that knowledge to transform his life.
Slow reading at times, as we follow Beck's early life and go with him through young manhood? Maybe. But everything he says in those chapters is necessary to the story, and his flashes of wry and biting humor had this particular reader howling at times. He spares himself nothing, and allows others who know him - wife "Peach" mostly, but also his children, brothers, and associates - to add their viewpoints even when they honestly disagree with his own.
No, this isn't a book about mountaineering. It's about redemption, and how high a price one man paid to find the happiness that should have been his all along. I am very glad I read it.