By Mark Obmascik
Fats, forty-four, father of 3 sons, and dealing with a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik may by no means have guessed that his subsequent flow will be up a 14,000-foot mountain. but if his twelve-year-old son will get bitten by means of the mountaineering trojan horse at summer season camp, Obmascik can't withstand the chance for a few high-altitude father-son bonding by way of mountain climbing a top jointly. After their first joint climb, addled by way of the skinny air, Obmascik makes a decision to maintain his head within the clouds and check out scaling all fifty four of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains, referred to as the Fourteeners -- and to do them in lower than one year.
The result's midway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik's rollicking, witty, occasionally harrowing, usually poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife event that's no sure bet, even if occasionally it's A stroll within the Woods -- yet with extra sweat and not more oxygen. part 1000000 humans attempt hiking a Colorado Fourteener each year, yet basically twelve hundred have pronounced summiting all of them. Can an obese, stay-at-home dad develop into No. 1,201?
With his ebullient character and gleaming prose, Obmascik brings us contained in the quirky, colourful culture of mountain climbing obsessives who summit those mountains 12 months after yr. Honoring his involved wife's orders to not climb by myself, Obmascik drags previous associates up the slopes, a few of them lifelong flatlanders tasting skinny air for the 1st time, and lures professional Rockies junkies into taking over a huffing, puffing beginner by way of bribing them with loose beer, lunches, and vehicle washes. one of the new acquaintances he makes are an ex-drag racer attempting to practice a headstand on each summit, the lead oboe participant in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down 4 beers and a burrito. alongside the best way, Obmascik reports the uncooked, rowdy, and infrequently visible intimacy of male friendship, braced by way of the double intoxicants of adrenaline and altitude.
Though risk is often current -- the Colorado Fourteeners have killed extra climbers than Mount Everest -- Mark is aware his getting older scalp can't come up with the money for the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer's Into skinny Air, and his quest turns into a narrative of relatives, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik's summer time of mountaineering, he loses fifteen kilos, reveals a couple of dozen man-dates, and profits appreciate for the background of those storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of many nation's most renowned non secular shrines). As a lot approximately midlife and male bonding because it is ready mountains, midway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can live to tell the tale all of them as they achieve for these such a lot far-off issues -- the summits of mountains and a teenage son. And as one guy exceeds the actual achievements of his early life, he discovers that age -- like summit top -- is simply a host.
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Extra info for Halfway to Heaven: My White-Knuckled--and Knuckleheaded--Quest for the Rocky Mountain High
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The volume’s editor, Sven Dupré, a historian of Renaissance optics, summarizes the conclusions of the contributors. It makes the Hockney–Falco theory “extremely unlikely as far as its application for the period before the first textual reference to image projection around 1550 is concerned”, he writes. This well-written volume may close the door on the Hockney–Falco tracing thesis. But it should also prove a good resource, especially for optical scientists lacking a background in the history of art or science, from which to explore optics in the early Renaissance.
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