Enduring Patagonia

Rating:
Summary: Well...he aint Krakauer...
Review: I read this book while stranded in an hosteria during a storm in Patagonia. How much more perfect can the situation be? I totally appreciate the passion Crouch conjures, but you can only hear the same old cliches so many times before you realize the author doesn't have anything else to offer. Yes, he loves climbing. Bravo. A lot of people love climbing, and a lot of people sacrifice a comfy job and home in order to satisfy that addiction. Crouch is trying to pave his climbing with a book that just doesn't quite measure up. He has some lovely passages, but if I were reading them from my apartment in Seattle rather than the aforementioned atmospheric perch in Chalten, Argentina, they wouldn't mean anything. That's the true measure of the book. Read it if you're an alpine junkie (or trapped by the Patagonian winds in Chalten), but otherwise, don't bother.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Fantastic - Beautiful
Review: If you climb and have a deep-rooted passion for the emotions that climbing stirs in you then I would highly recommend this book. You don't have to be on the cutting edge of climbing to understand in your heart what Crouch talks about in Enduring Patagonia. Empathy, focus, inner-demons, harmony, determination, pain, self-realization and the laurels of success are the streams of conscious thought that are conveyed so beautifully in Crouch's book. If you climb you know that all these feeling come out in great strength throughout almost every climb. I've never been able to put into words all the emotions and the reason for ones passion of climbing but Crouch's book does a stellar job of wording our obsession with the sport and lifestyle.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction or not, I enjoyed it
Review: Well written book about Crouch's interesting life and a vivid picture of his climbing trips to Patagonia. Crouch's point of view is unglamorous; his descriptions (and pictures) of base camp hovels are disgusting, the climbs sound miserable, and the weeks of waiting for good weather seem mindnumbing. And yet, to paraphrase the author, he'd rather be no where else. This curious incongruity kept me engrossed in the book to the end. A very rewarding read.