I honestly don´t know what to make of this book. I´m not even sure I particularly liked it. It feels like I didn´t get the insight into the topic that I would have wanted to get from this book.
I would have loved to understand why people feel the need to climb mountains and it´s not a sufficient answer for me to say that they climb because of the beauty of the scenery or that they expand their mind by doing so. This might have applied to people, who have lived 200 years ago, but I can´t buy this for mountaineers nowadays.
The tag line of this book says "A History of Fascination" and this pretty much sums up what this book is. A history of mankinds fascination for the mountains, written from a very British point of view (I swear, almost every person he writes about has been from the British Isles).
One of the thing I found intersting in this book, is MacFarlane´s discussion of perception and how people perceive the mountain from far away in contrast to the harsh reality of the real thing. Unfortunately this just wasn´t enough to make me like this book more than I did.
Page count: 279 pages = $ 3.00
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