Mountain Madness:

Mountain Madness:
by Robert Birkby

Mountain Madness:
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Book Summary Information

Author: Robert Birkby
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-01
ISBN: 0806528761
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Citadel

Book Reviews of Mountain Madness:

Book Review: Biography of Scott Fischer
Summary: 5 Stars

Essentially a biography of Scott Fischer by a close friend. A gut wrenching story of Fischer's early mountaineering accomplishments including the formation of his company Mountain Madness. The early chapters include the authors personal friendship with Fischer and go on to include Fischer's exploration of the Himalaya. The story ends sadly in Fischer's untimely death on Mount Everest in 1996. Despite the mainstream media's parsing of the events of that expedition which was well documented in Jon Krakauer's book "Into Thin Air", you can't help but feel that Fischer was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Birkby captures the essence of Scott Fischer as a quintessential outdoorsman and mountaineer and narrates the book by including his personal knowledge of Fishcer's home and family life.
An outstanding tome that will give you a better insight into how difficult, and personally consuming, a life as a high altitude mountaineer can be.
Fischer famously made it to the summit of K2 with Ed Viesturs, the first American to summit all 14 of the planet's 8000 meter peaks.Viesturs documents his last encounter with Fischer's frozen body high on Everest in his book "No Shortcuts to the Top".
Spellbinding!
Well done!

Summary of Mountain Madness:

"You're either cruisin' or you're bummin', so you might as well cruise."--Scott Fischer

Mountain climber Scott Fischer's mantra would lead him to scale the highest and most treacherous peaks on earth. Best known as one of the guides who perished near the summit of Mount Everest during the tragic spring of 1996, Scott Fischer became for many an iconic symbol of audacity, hubris, and the limits of human endurance. But to those who knew him well, Scott was much more than an action figure at the heart of a modern-day cautionary tale. Now in this vivid, candid biography, Robert Birkby--one of Scott's close friends--gives us a fascinating, in-depth portrait of who Scott Fischer really was and what led him to the top of the world.

As a teenage athlete growing up in New Jersey, Scott felt a restless drive to reach beyond the limits of his suburban environment. He discovered the freedom he sought during summers in the rugged mountains of Wyoming. A natural mountaineer blessed with tremendous physical strength and willpower, Scott thrived on the challenges of climbing, the beauty of the high country, and the like-minded people he found there. With the creation of a guide service he called Mountain Madness, Scott meshed his need to climb with his joy in sharing with others the lofty, rarified realms he had made his own.

In adrenaline-filled narratives that take us to the world's tallest places, Robert Birkby traces the expeditions that made Scott one of the most respected climbers of the close-knit mountaineering community. From Alaska to the Soviet Union, from the granite walls of Yosemite to the punishing storms of the Himalayas, Scott's achievements are hair-raising, inspiring, and always exhilarating--a relentless quest for new highs that builds inexorably to the rendezvous with disaster on Everest.

Scott's life was a journey filled with adventures, deep friendships, and dramatic successes and failures in the obscure reaches of some of the world's most beautiful and dangerous places. A captivating homage to a man who eagerly went where few dare to go, Mountain Madness is an extraordinary account of courage, passion, and extreme living.

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