Decent book, but too much irrelevant details
Annapurna a woman’s place by Arlene Blum
Book on Amazon | My review on Amazon
3 out of 5 stars
Reviewed July 4, 2010
An all-woman team climbing Annapurna – one of the most dangerous 8000’ers. Definitely a worthy achievement to write a book about, that too with two of the members summiting and returning successfully. But Arlene Blum’s style includes too many details about the team politics, interpersonal interactions and personal opinions. All that takes away from the main story of the mountain and adventure.
It left me feeling sad overall for the state of feminism – the kind of things women feel they have to do to prove points – in this case with tragic results – two of the team lost their lives on the mountain. After the first successful summit team returned to camp 3, the second pair of women set off against all advice and better judgement and with no sherpa support. They died not because they were women or less capable, but mainly because they allowed extraneous factors to cloud their judgement of the conditions.
I found it interesting that the author talks about boiling snow up for drinking water, as a pleasant and undemanding chore, which she does sitting with her feet dangling over some 1000 foot drop out of camp 2 or 3… all other mountaineers writing about their adventures (okay, all I’ve read have been male so far) talk about this same boiling water chore as almost unbearable in its mind-numbing repetition – and at best talk about it as a necessary evil. Hmm.. interesting.. women like these “domestic” chores more? 😉
The problems created by sherpas and porters seemed disproportionately high. Again, likely to be due to the male sherpas’ ego clashes with an all-women team. It came across from the writing that the author, who was also the expedition leader, could have dealt better with the sherpa problems – there were others in the group who seemed to have struck a better rapport. It seemed, from her own account, as if the author was particularly unsuited to being the leader.
In short, not a book to read for the sheer love of mountains or adventure.
