You don’t have to be an expert, or even a novice climber to enjoy Kenton Cool’s memoir, One Man’s Everest. I’m a wimp of the first order when it comes to heights, particularly if there is a sheer drop in the vicinity. So was this book for me? Yes – I couldn’t put it down.
Kenton Cool (what a fabulous name for a mountaineer) has devoted most of his adult life to climbing, whether completing challenges, or as a climbing guide. He writes with humour and self deprecating understatement which belies the enormous achievements of his career, the summit (no pun intended) of which has not in his opinion yet been reached.
Cool keeps technical language to a minimum and while I’m sure his fellow mountaineers and climbers would find much to enjoy in the book, there is also plenty to interest the rest of us. For this is the tale of one man’s determination to conquer not only the highest peaks in the world, but also his own physical handicaps and his self doubts about what his choice of lifestyle does to his wife and young family. He talks about motivation and about the hardships he and fellow climbers endure. He writes too of the toll the increasing popularity of ‘big peak’ mountaineering takes on the environment and the dangers casual commercialism brings to climbers and their support networks. Poignantly he also talks about the terrible impact of the recent earthquake in Nepal and the devastation it has caused to a people he clearly holds in very high regard.
I’d have liked more information about how he recovered sufficiently from his ear ly accident – after which he was told that further climbing was completely out of the question – to be able to climb Everest on several occasions. You can’t please everyone.
Perhaps appealing to a wide range of readers is one of the best tests of a successful memoir and One Man’s Everest achieves this. It is readable, inspiring, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
One Man’s Everest will be published as a Preface hardback on 27th August 2015.
http://www.prefacepublishing.co.uk