Review of "The Next Everest"

Not only am I trying to get caught up on my reading, but also on my listening of audiobooks.  This was a good one to start on that goal - here is my review of "The Next Everest"

 

Title/Author:

“The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain’s Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again” by Jim Davidson

Rating: 

5 of 5 stars (excellent)

Review: Resilience is a tricky word to either define or describe when it is believed a person has it.  Nonetheless, it is the perfect word to describe the adventures on Mount Everest experienced by the author of this book, Jim Davidson.  Not only did he survive through a 7.8 magnitude earthquake while ascending Everest in 2015 (it killed approximately 8900 people) but after the quake aborted that attempt to reach the summit, he was determined to try again and did so triumphantly two years later.  This book is his memoir of those two events and other parts of his life that led up to them.

The audiobook, which is narrated by Tim Campbell, is very detailed and very descriptive of the earthquake and the two days spent by Davidson and his team awaiting rescue.  Even though the reader/listener will know how it ends, it is still very tense and dramatic with twists and setbacks.  Davidson also does a wonderful job describing what was going through his mind at the time, especially with the concern about other climbers.  He reminds his audience that any loss of life in the climbing community is a painful loss and each time he heard about another death, it is easy to see how he was hurt.  That this came through so well with another person doing the narrating shows how good Campbell’s reading of the book is.

Davidson’s return to Everest, while very inspiring, didn’t evoke the same amount of emotion or drama for me, but it was still a very good account of the climb, as was his description of past events in his life that either made him decide to be a climber or shaped the kind of person that he became.  He doesn’t talk a lot about his family.  The most that he does is when he describes his satellite calls to them while stranded after the quake. These parts of the book didn’t seem to come together as nicely as the passages on the mountain, but nonetheless help the reader/listener put together the total picture of Davidson’s two trips on the world’s tallest peak – a great story of resilience.

Link: The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain's Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again: Davidson, Jim: 9781250272294: Amazon.com: Books