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Simon Yates
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Book
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Publisher | Vintage | ||
ISBN | 978-00997664 | ||
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Reviewer
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Vicky
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Synopsis
Simon Yates is 'the one who cut the rope' in Joe Simpson's award-winning account of their epic struggle for survival in Touching the Void. Afterwards, Yates continued mountaineering on the hardest routes. Perhaps the most testing of all was one of the world's largest vertical rockfaces, the 4, 000-ft East Face of the Central Tower of Paine in Chile. Battered by ferocious storms and almost crippled with fear just below the summit, Yates and his three companions are forced into a nightmare retreat. After resting in a nearby town, they return to complete the climb, but Yates knows he still has to face one of life's greatest challenges...
Review
I first came across Simon Yates in Joe Simpson's book 'Touching the Void' as the man who cut the rope, which I read in 2004, and wanted to find out about this mountaineer. I discovered he's written two books this one 'Against the Wall' and 'Flames of Adventure'.
In Against the Wall he and some friends tried to climb the 4,000 East Face of the Central Tower of Paine in Chile; to say it was a waterlogged epic is an understatement, because there were as much tears as there was rain and wind in the extreme. For me this book came at a time when my husband David and I had fought so hard for an autism specific residential home for our adult daughter, Naomi.
The tears and frustrations that Simon went through with the emotional trauma was exactly how we felt but for different reasons. This is a wonderful book describing how it really is - being buffeted by extremely strong winds that cracked through the towers and the despair and lack of energy, and in the end having to give up the climb.
For an armchair mountaineer this is a terrific, very visual evocative book to read which I highly recommend to everyone. And if you can, catch one of his talks because they're great fun.
Last but not least - Simon may have cut the rope, but in doing so he saved two lives which if he had not, there would be no Joe Simpson to write 'Touching the Void' and becoming an award winning author.
Simon went on to climb just about every mountain in sight and is now a mountaneer/explorer with his own commercial mountaineering company.
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