Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing biography of a fascinating man
Review: I had read an article about Guy Waterman some time ago and was anxious to know more about him. So, when I learned of Chip Brown's book, I was eager to read it. At the end, I was frustrated. I wanted to know how Waterman LIVED his life; Brown was intent on focusing entirely on why he chose to DIE. Brown makes clear that Waterman was enormously respected and loved by many people. But he fails to explore his relationships with anyone other than his family. Waterman was the legendary man of the mountains in New Hampshire, but Brown tells us very little of why that was true - other than telling us how many times he climbed all the 4,000'+ peaks and writing some books about them, books he describes only very cursorily.
Waterman and his second wife, Laura, chose to live, like Helen and Scott Nearing, a very basic, really primitive lifestyle back in the woods in Vermont, but again Brown describes their lives only minimally.
I love mountains and forests. I love hard physical effort (I was a serious, competitive long distance runner for more than 40 years until arthritis stopped me.) Like the Watermans, I hate the materialistic way of life favored by almost all Americans. And, like Guy Waterman, I completely believe that a person should have the choice of when to exit this world, if old age and decreptitude make life not worth living.
In short, this should have been a made-to-order book for me. But I became weary of Brown's endless psycho-analyzing of Waterman, and in time I skimmed the psycho-babble, looking for the occasional passages which provided information about how he - and Laura - actually lived.
Ironically, Brown failed in the one task he assigned himself - to give a clear explanation for Waterman's suicide. Yes, he couldn't do all he had once done, but he still was very fit, fit enough to climb to the top of that mountain in brutal winter cold to end his life. And he left behind - DESERTED - a woman he seemed clearly to love greatly. Why did so many love such a man?
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing biography of a fascinating man
Review: I had read an article about Guy Waterman some time ago and was anxious to know more about him. So, when I learned of Chip Brown's book, I was eager to read it. At the end, I was frustrated. I wanted to know how Waterman LIVED his life; Brown was intent on focusing entirely on why he chose to DIE. Brown makes clear that Waterman was enormously respected and loved by many people. But he fails to explore his relationships with anyone other than his family. Waterman was the legendary man of the mountains in New Hampshire, but Brown tells us very little of why that was true - other than telling us how many times he climbed all the 4,000'+ peaks and writing some books about them, books he describes only very cursorily.
Waterman and his second wife, Laura, chose to live, like Helen and Scott Nearing, a very basic, really primitive lifestyle back in the woods in Vermont, but again Brown describes their lives only minimally.
I love mountains and forests. I love hard physical effort (I was a serious, competitive long distance runner for more than 40 years until arthritis stopped me.) Like the Watermans, I hate the materialistic way of life favored by almost all Americans. And, like Guy Waterman, I completely believe that a person should have the choice of when to exit this world, if old age and decreptitude make life not worth living.
In short, this should have been a made-to-order book for me. But I became weary of Brown's endless psycho-analyzing of Waterman, and in time I skimmed the psycho-babble, looking for the occasional passages which provided information about how he - and Laura - actually lived.
Ironically, Brown failed in the one task he assigned himself - to give a clear explanation for Waterman's suicide. Yes, he couldn't do all he had once done, but he still was very fit, fit enough to climb to the top of that mountain in brutal winter cold to end his life. And he left behind - DESERTED - a woman he seemed clearly to love greatly. Why did so many love such a man?
Rating: 
Summary: More Death than Life
Review: I have long been a fan of Guy Waterman - the sort of man that many admire but few emulate. His wilderness ethic was beyond reproach in an era where few mountaineers could make the same claim. Bits and pieces of his family story have been told in article and essay format by such writers as Jon Waterman and John Krakauer. And of course, we are left with several collections by Guy Waterman himself. To that collection we can add this confused book, which seeks to be part Greek tragedy, part love story, mystery, part cautionary tale. In the end, it is only partially successful and the attempts at clinical psychology come across as particularly muddy and new-agey. The frequent asides early in the book caused me to put it down multiple times. Also, we spend much more time trying to get into Waterman's head than we do getting into his beloved home mountain ranges.The first half of the book attempts to make a mystery out of something completely obvious - why Waterman would take his own life. In the end Guy Waterman was a man who chose to live his values. Rare in the world, to be sure. So it is not at all unusual that he would choose to die by those values, as well. Fortunately, the author backs off from this angle in the second half of the book, the narrative improves dramatically, and the book becomes more difficult to set aside. It becomes a father and sons book, touching and revealing, only occasionally bothered by high-reaching prose.
Rating:
Summary: A Life Worth Studying Without All The Literary Detours
Review: I heard the end of a review of this book on National Public Radio. It inspired me to rent it out of the library... Guy Waterman's life is worth studying. He traveled to the beat of his own drum. His life was a series of conflicts about depression, alcoholism, heroicism verses self-preservation. Guy Waterman, an extermely gifted individual faught a successful battle with alcoholism. To defeat this deamon Waterman moved to the mountains and insulated himself with nature. Waterman was not as successful with his battle against depression, however. He refused medical intervention. "I would rather be a free man in hell than a prisoner in heaven."
Waterman ultimately took his own life by freezing to death on top of a favorite mountain. Waterman was 67 when he committed suicide. The reactions of friends and relatives to he suicide make up a good portion of the book. The author tries to sort out the roots of Waterman's depression and creates parrallels between his death and the tragic Mountaineering deaths of two of his sons. What I didn't care for in this book is all the literary referencing. Much of this was lost to me. Several times I almost stopped reading this book because I was not privy to poetry from Milton's Paradise Lost. I am glad that I perservered, however. This biography gives thought to the idea of choosing the manner of ones death. Waterman choose his own path with the knowledge of his wife and some close friends. This final trail and their reactions to it make Guy Waterman's life worth reading. Stuart Don Levy MD
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting look inside the mind of a complex individual
Review: I thought this book was very well done. It was always interesting and presents its subjects (the Watermans) in a decent light. I think that as an author of a subject like this it would be easy to cast judgement on Guy Waterman, but Chip Brown lets the reader come to thier own conclusions. I really enjoyed this book, and I believe that C. Brown did a good job in showing the complexity of the situations the Watermans encountered.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting look inside the mind of a complex individual
Review: I thought this book was very well done. It was always interesting and presents its subjects (the Watermans) in a decent light. I think that as an author of a subject like this it would be easy to cast judgement on Guy Waterman, but Chip Brown lets the reader come to thier own conclusions. I really enjoyed this book, and I believe that C. Brown did a good job in showing the complexity of the situations the Watermans encountered.
Rating:
Summary: Leaky New Journalism
Review: If Chip Brown could have kept himself out of this book for more than two pages (exaggeration), I would be nudging it up one or two stars. He does an excellent job of recounting Waterman's life and death, and the effect of both on the people around him. The description of Waterman's homestead, named Barra, in East Corinth, VT is compelling and when he sticks to the action and details of any event or subject, the pages turn by themselves. What irked me throughout was the constant first person references that broke the spell of Brown's otherwise great storytelling. The first few chapters almost turned me off completely with Brown's constant self-reference and judgemental asides about the nature of Waterman's suicide. This was a story waiting to be shown, not told - to break out a dusty but still fundamental edict. Mr. Brown blows his assignment: "When I got up to leave Lou Cornell's farmhouse, I was no clearer about the meaning of Waterman's life and death, but I knew about the hold they had, the story-ness of what happend." Then why not just give us the story? The effect of Brown name-checking himself is jarring right up until the end of the book. Late in the pages he has us wound up and, even though we know how the story turns out, we read the words like they were Waterman's last steps up Old Bridle Path. The last hike of this man's life is unfolding before us. It is great stuff. And then, in the middle of the hike, when another hiker sees Waterman heading up and recoginzes that he has an exceptionally long ice axe for that kind of trek - you can hear the clang: "'It was at least a hundred centimeters,' he told me over the phone." What are the words "me", "told" and "phone" doing in that sentence? Mucking it up is what.
Rating: 
Summary: A Compelling Page Turner
Review: This book is one hell of a page turner. Chip Brown, in indefatigable prose, manages to capture the mindset of an enigmatic adventurer. Powerful stuff in today's sea of drivel. Buy it, read it, get out of the house, and get on with it!
Rating:
Summary: a comedy, if you recognize the characters involved
Review: This book is something of a comedy and something of a detective story if, from personal experience, you recognize that the author and Guy Waterman draw conscious sustenance from two distinct and widely separated wells. Guy Waterman obviously sought and found his sustenance from nature, turning his back on the office/city culture at age 40 to spend the next 27 years living mostly by his own manual labor in the woods and taking up with a new wife who shared the venture with him. Although he makes a few bows to that achievement, the author, Chip Brown, obviously little clue how such choices, and the few people who find the energy to pursue them, call into question the course of our entire civilization. The author in his generous self-revelation seems like the prototypical "city slicker". The book jacket quotes him as living in New York City, and he spends most of the book spinning New-York-times style vocabulary and literary webs around his puzzlement at Guy's death and extensive speculation about Guy's psychic process. Apparently in his eyes Guy's life in nature and climbing could represent only one of two things: either a mysterious lifestyle aesthetic choice or a mechanism for coping with so-called depression. He presents Guy's emotional/spiritual life as one vast family soap opera. The author seems to have done as much and as thorough research as one might want and seems quite earnest, sympathetic, sometimes charming, in his self-revelation, but eventually tedious in his literary expositions that grasp for, but don't reach the high drama he senses in Guy's story. Yes, I believe Guy lived with "depression", even despair. I also believe from my own experience of climbing and nature that half the human race sees ecosystems collapsing, animals and plants steadily disappearing from daily life, and also lives with a variant of that despair. It is not the crushing disruptive burden of sudden loss, but the slow bleed of seeing the spiritual home of the human race for as long as you care to call us human -- up to a couple million years -- being methodically destroyed, perhaps forever. I give Guy credit for speaking very loudly by his choices and self-sustaining actions for that half (or more) of the human race -- the loosing half if you will. That, I would contend, was the primary source of his despair: the overwhelming odds such people know are arrayed against them and against what is dearest to them -- not primarily the family circus or the developmental drama of childhood and its residue in the adult. Chip Brown, unfortunately, seems to not have bumped into this fact within his own understanding of life, and so cannot see it in Guy's life. But his earnest searches of "the dark" (Guy's death) do offer the reader a modicum of suspense and ironic humor if he or she can bear the fact that the detective-author explicates a maudlin plot and leaves even that unresolved.
Rating:
Summary: A well-penned epilogue
Review: This very artfully told tale was truly page turner for me. Thick with literary references, Brown's story of Guy Waterman reflects the complexity of a multi-talented individual, appreciated by many, but omniouly least of all by himself. I came away with a very strong feeling that Guy Waterman was truly a unique individual. His successes far outweighed his failures. But his ultimate failure was to recognize that hardmen mature into wisemen. Old Men of the Mountain types, who regale their friends and cohorts with lessons and values of challenging and living amongst the mountains. No matter how far flung the challenge, a mountaineer's ultimate objective is to return from his/her adventure to share the experience; the cold, the hard breathing, the colors, the wind and their intimate feelings of wonder or survival. Regretfully, Guy's inner-self, his demons, contested his own outwardly generous, steadfast and friendly personality. For me, Brown's story reacquainted me with several names and places familiar in mountaineering circles. It also cleard my long held confusion between John Waterman the highly acclaimed, albeit daring alpinist, Guy's son and Jonathan Waterman the prolific author of Alaskan mountaineering. HOWEVER, as an end note the publisher editorial and Author INCORRECTLY stated that Krakauer wrote about John Waterman. The book Into the Wild was the story of Chris McCandless, by J.Krakauer.
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