Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
    Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
    Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
    Audiobook9 hours

    Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

    Written by Robert Macfarlane

    Narrated by James A. Gillies

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme.

    Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert Macfarlane reveals how the mystery of the world's highest places has come to grip the Western imagination-and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes.

    His story begins three centuries ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious beasts. In the mid-1700s the attentions of both science and poetry sparked a passion for mountains; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lord Byron extolled the sublime experiences to be had on high; and by 1924 the death on Mount Everest of an Englishman named George Mallory came to symbolize the heroic ideals of his day. Macfarlane also reflects on fear, risk, and the shattering beauty of ice and snow, the competition and contemplation of the climb, and the strange alternate reality of high altitude, magically enveloping us in the allure of mountains at every level.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 18, 2019
    ISBN9781515919162
    Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
    Author

    Robert Macfarlane

    Robert Macfarlane won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003). His second, The Wild Places (2007), was similarly celebrated, winning three prizes and being shortlisted for six more. Both books were adapted for television by the BBC. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

    More audiobooks from Robert Macfarlane

    Related to Mountains of the Mind

    Related audiobooks

    Sports & Recreation For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Rewilding Our Minds

      Jun 1, 2021

      Rewilding Our Minds
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Stiperstones

      Jan 26, 2024

      The Stiperstones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Guiding Lights

      Mar 21, 2022

      Guiding Lights
      5 min read

    • Article

      Polar Panels

      May 16, 2019

      A COUPLE of months ago I was invited to a dinner party at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Mind you, to call it a dinner party was to sell it short, it was a happening. I had been summoned by my friend, Humphry, who is himself a bit o

      2 min read

    • Article

      Worship On High

      Oct 18, 2021

      Worship On High
      5 min read

    • Article

      PUT YOUR NOSE IN A BOOK FACT & FICTION

      Oct 13, 2023

      BY DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY Jonathan Ball, RRP R280 For Heroic Age Explorers, ‘Antarctica was a katabasis: a journey beyond the limits of experience, a voyage beyond life to the underworld’. And for Ernest Henry Shackleton and his crew aboard Endurance,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend

      Jun 17, 2020

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend
      4 min read

    • Article

      Stop Hating on Adjectives!

      Jun 12, 2019

      A common admonition in creative writing pedagogy is, “Cut as many adjectives as possible.” I propose that this rule springs from mere prejudice. The post Stop Hating on Adjectives! appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2023

      In the popular belief, ghosts are a selecting tribe, avoiding millions, speaking to one. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Demonology,” North American Review, 1877 Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose he

      3 min read

    • Article

      There Be Treasure, Danger And Death

      Dec 3, 2019

      What if I told you there is a treasure chest filled with precious gemstones, gold nuggets and priceless artifacts hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains? That an eccentric art collector buried an antique, metal box worth over $5 million dollars some

      7 min read

    • Article

      Elegy Of The Walker

      Apr 22, 2021

      Sojourn into a world so foreign was the birthright of the first humans, and it still is today, if you choose it. The post Elegy of the Walker appeared first on The Millions.

      20 min read

    • Article

      Following The Flow

      Aug 31, 2019

      Following The Flow
      11 min read

    • Article

      A Watery Graveyard Revisited

      Apr 27, 2023

      A Watery Graveyard Revisited
      2 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Walking Back To Life

      Sep 21, 2022

      Walking Back To Life
      5 min read

    • Article

      Shasta to the Sea

      Feb 16, 2017

      Shasta to the Sea
      11 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Arthurian Legend Tripping

      Jan 4, 2021

      Arthurian Legend Tripping
      10 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2022

      Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, T

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 3, 2019

      And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. —Ogden Nash, “Everybody Tells Me Everything,” The Face Is Familiar, 1941 Someone goes by wearing a

      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Sep 12, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Mountains of the Mind

    4/5

    170 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      The book is so full of interesting facts laid out in such detail as to be like a play. However, the narrator was obnoxious in his Shakespearian delivery and almost ruined it for me.
    • 4/5
      The peak is Everest, Mallory on Everest. Our route takes us through Petrarch, Shelley, Johnson... how did we, western culture I suppose, become so fascinated, entranced, by mountains, by climbing up mountains? Macfarlane does a very good job of factoring out the components, curiosity, competition, conquering, contemplating... all combined to drive Mallory to his doom. Very well written, of course. A nice combination of personal experience with cultural history.
    • 4/5
      Everyone has their happy place, and for me its the mountains. I'm no climber (I prefer my limbs all in one piece), but there's nowhere I feel more at peace than when I'm taking in the view from a beautiful mountain or hilly peak. In Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind, he sets out to explain what drives people to the mountains in their droves, and especially what drives those who are prepared to risk their lives in pursuit of a particular summit. The premise of this book is, potentially, a difficult one. It's one thing to be a lover of the mountains and just 'get' what it's like being amongst the peaks, but it's entirely another to try to explain that over the full length of a book. Hence the mix of climbing history, geology, personal memoir and religion which makes up 'Mountains of the Mind', subtitled 'A History of a Fascination'.I must admit that when I bought this book I missed the subtitle*, so I probably went into this read on the wrong foot. I was expecting (and looking for) a travelogue that would sweep me back up amongst the mountain peaks in this tiresome year of non-travel, but if I'd read the full title properly I'd have realised that this is more of a history of mountain attraction. Some of the history had me riveted (for example the chapter on Mallory's fatal attraction to Everest), but in other places I feel he got too caught up in trying to give a fully comprehensive chronological account of British climbing development. In my mind that's a different book, and I would have loved if he'd spent a little less time back in the 1700s and focused more on modern climbing. For example, what drives 20,000 people - many of them inexperienced tourists - to climb Mont Blanc every year, despite helicopters lifting on average a body a day from the peaks above Chamonix in climbing season?That said, Macfarlane is both an explorer himself and a talented wielder of the pen, and overall I really enjoyed this book. When he wasn't bogged down in the extensiveness of his own research, Macfarlane's knowledge and passion for the mountains is translated into wonderful writing that brings you shivering to the edge of many a snowy precipice. His own climbing adventures were fascinating - in fact, I'd have loved to have seen more of those memoirs in place of some of the historical detail.Despite my niggles (and again, my fault for going in with the wrong expectation), this book did teleport me back to the mountains for a few days, and has left me with a hunger for some further mountain reading in 2021. I find myself particularly interested in the climbing history of the sherpas, whose achievements are so often overlooked in climbing history. If anyone has any recommendations on that front let me know.4 stars - a fascinating read (but you can still keep your crampons - I'm happy to climb by armchair).* In my defence this book seems to have a number of editions, many of which have 'adventures in reaching the summit' as the subtitle, which is closer to what I was expecting.
    • 5/5
      This is subtitled "A History Of A Fascination", which perfectly captures the subject.

      Macfarlane evocatively describes how Romantic ideas about nature and the Victorian drive for exploration, combined with new ideas about deep time and geology, replaced the medieval view of mountains as bleak and haunted wastelands. The culmination of the book is Mallory's expeditions to Everest, which bring together all of these themes.

      A climber himself, Macfarlane is utterly brilliant at describing the experiences of travelling in high altitudes, the incredible beauty of the places and the fascination, and outright obsession, that they have inspired.
    • 4/5
      Three centuries ago, no one was interested in mountains and other wild places. The land could not be cultivated, nor was there any point in possessing them and the people who inhabited these heights were considered a lesser human. They were considered no go areas. But in the middle of the Eighteenth century, this perception of the mountain began to change. The premise of the sublime, the balance point of fear and exhilaration that could be achieved when climbing, coupled with the sense that the mountains were much, much older than previously thought, meant that the great thinkers of the age became interested in the how and why they were formed.

      And so begins Macfarlane’s mountain adventure. He writes about the forces that make mountains and the glaciers that populate them. There is lot on our perception of them too, the overcoming of the fear that these immense heights can bring, the fixation of getting to the summit of these peaks. These beautiful peaks can be deadly too, the Alps claim one climber a day during the season, and less people die on Scottish roads than they do in the mountains. But those that conquer the peaks are shown the magnificence and beauty of the world beneath their feet.

      Macfarlane ends with an gripping account of Mallory and his obsession with the highest peak in the world, Everest. An avid climber and adventurer, who climbed various peaks including setting one of the hardest routes up Pillar Rock in the lakes. Starting in 1921, he was a member of three expeditions to Nepal where they explored various potential routes up the mountain. No one had tried to climb at this altitude before, and there were an number of fatalities and numerous cases of frostbite, before he returned in 1924 for the final attempt. On the 8th June Mallory and Irvine start for the final ascent. As they do a fine mist descends around them, and they are last seen moving along a ridge as the mist swirls around them.

      I have been meaning to read this book for absolutely ages. Macfarlane is one of my favourite writers, and I have read all hi others, but not this, his first. He manages to weave together the mindset of the people that climb these peaks with the cultural history and deep geological time of these places. The writing is lyrical, poetic and engaging, and he describes what he sees with beautiful prose so you can drink in he view too. But in that beauty is danger too; no climb, even in summer is risk free, and even though mountains can bring exhilaration to your life, they can claim it too. For me it is a solid four, not as good as his later books though.
    • 4/5
      Very pleasantly surprised to find that Macfarlane named Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, one of my favourite books, as an inspiration for this one.
    • 4/5
      A cultural history/autobiographical memoir of mountains as human fascination. Macfarlane's crisp, lyrical writing is a real delight, and I'm quite looking forward to more of his books. 
    • 5/5
      As ever, Robert McFarlane's writing is beautiful and stimulating. I had not realised that he was a climber so this book combines two of his passions, climbing and wild places and a third, which I have now discovered is George Mallory, Another reviewer, Sarah O'Toole summed up my feelings about this book better than I can "His use of language to bring me into regions explored, read about and imagined often took my breath away, engaging all the senses and making me wonder what these marvels would be like to experience first hand." - I could never have climbed but I now feel I understand much Excellent.
    • 5/5
      I never knew I was interested in mountains and mountaineering until I read this. At times he's quite profound.
    • 4/5
      Robert Macfarlane has a great ability to convey his passions without proselytising, and without ever boring readers who don't feel the same degree of obsession. Earlier in the year I read, and was entranced by, his beautiful exploration of ancients routes that have survived into the modern day, "The Old Ways". I had wondered if my enjoyment of that book was, in part at least, driven by my own burgeoning interest in walking as a pastime. However, my enjoyment of this book is not in any way a reflection of any passion for mountaineering of my own - on those rare occasions when I make the mistake of walking from the basement canteen at work up to my fifth floor office, I find myself wheezing and gasping for breath, imagining I am about to start coughing up blood. I might not be quite as feeble as Proust, who claimed to be suffering vertigo after the journey from Versailles to Paris (a route which, over the space of several miles, described a difference in altitude of just 89 metres), but I am not about to break out the ropes and pitons or don any crampons any time too soon. (It does occur to me, though, that if I were regularly to carry an ice axe in open view, I might not be troubled by quite so many nutters when I travel on the Tube.)

      I do like looking at mountains, though, and that attraction of the peak-bestrewn wilds for the town dweller is another aspect that Macfarlane covers in depth. The idea that mountaineers climb mountains simply because they are there is now almost a given in modern thought, but this has only been the case for a relatively short portion of the human experience. Up until the late seventeenth century mountains were merely seen as obstacles to trade routes to be climbed only when there was no viable alternative route for merchants to circumvent them. The eighteenth century saw a gradual change that accelerated into the nineteenth century, when the vogue for bagging peaks really began. Macfarlane catalogues these developments with awe at the courage or recklessness of Victorian adventurers setting off with no equipment, seldom even bothering to don more appropriate boots. Nowadays the outdoor activity equipment industry is worth billions.

      Macfarlane's own love of mountains and mountaineering arose from his holiday visits to his grandparents in the Scottish Highlands. He read old accounts of mountaineering expeditions in his grandfathers extensive library, and he went up various Monroes, picking up different rock as he went. His interest in the geology of the mountains is as enticing as his stories about climbing them.

      He also gives a fascinating concise history of the geology of the major mountain ranges, along with an analysis of changing views of how (and when) the mountains were formed. Once again he handles an area susceptible to technical overload with great adroitness.

      The book is peppered with recollections of Macfarlane's own mountaineering experiences, often alarmingly self-deprecating in tone, though it is clear that he is an accomplished climber. He offers appealing accounts of some of the great climbing expeditions, too,including the legendary Mallory who made three attempts upon Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924,, meeting his death on the final one.

      This was a very entertaining read for a vicarious adventurer such as myself, though I imagine that those more actively involved in mountaineering might also find it very enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      An early book from Robert McFarlane that shows his talent emerging. Too structured, too reliant on other sources, extracts and summaries. His editor told him to include more 'I' and he was right. Odd glimpses of his later descriptive talents but not many. He can go too far towards sentimentality and nostaligia sometimes but he takes the trouble to see what is around him which many don't.
    • 4/5
      Macfarlane explores how the fascination with mountains first developed by noting the history and literature of this subject as well as by describing his own mountain climbing adventures and then ending with the story of Mallory's attempt to climb Mt Everest. He describes Mallory's fascination with Everest as partly due to "the emotional traditions which he inherited and cultivated" which Macfarlane has talked about in the first part of the book.The book is very well written and researched, but for me goes on a little too long on explicating the history of thoughts about mountains. It works best when he writes about Mallory's three attempts to climb Everest and why we are fascinated by mountains today. He says "At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into- that the world has been made for humans by humans...."One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence...."mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes."
    • 3/5
      A gorgeous meditation on just what mountains mean to us. Lyrical and beautiful