End of the Rope

March 12, 2018
With a wonderful combination of adventure and introspection, outdoor writer Redford tells of a life lived on the fringes of society and in the heights of the Banff mountains in British Columbia. Her love of climbing began in 1974 when, as a 14 year old, she shrugged off a fear of falling and free climbed a cliff “four times as high as” her house. The sense of achievement and approval she got from subsequent successful climbs pushed her into a life of adventure. In her early 20s she fell in love with fellow climber Dan, but he soon died in an avalanche. She found comfort in one of Dan’s friends, an extreme climber named Grant; they married, had two children, and she got a teaching degree and taught elementary school. As Redford reflects on the evolution of both her marriage and her professional life, her prose seamlessly moves from witty and gutsy to introspective and sad (“ sat on the edge of the mattress, my knee bouncing up and own like it did when I was scared out of my mind on a climb”). She divorced in middle age and became a single mother; it was then that she took lessons learned from climbing and quit teaching to pursue writing. Redford’s is a truly inspiring and honest account of what it means to be a strong woman who can reach new heights because she isn’t afraid to fall.

April 1, 2018
A memoir of mountaineering and life by a Canadian alpinist.In 1972, 14-year-old Redford moved from the Yukon to Ontario with her family. It wasn't a happy time, she writes, with an overworked mother and a father who retreated into a bottle; she sublimated by climbing such heights as she could find to "blow off some of this fuck you! anger." The confused teenager morphed into an adult with a yen for fellow climbing fools who live dangerously and sometimes pay the price. A tragedy, major or minor, comes along every couple of dozen pages, peppered with plenty of near misses ("I'd chopped my rope and I'd almost killed my friend") that, in the way of mountaineers, get shrugged off ("I'm still here, aren't I?"). The author's firsthand look into the mores of the climbing tribe is occasionally overheated but seldom digs deep; it's a matter of cold beers, righteous peaks, and free-wheeling clichés ("I'd never get sucked into a middle-class existence again...it was a thinly disguised form of enslavement"). Her reckoning with the conflicting demands of marriage and motherhood is often superficial: "If the boys came back with the second ascent of the Rupal Face and, on top of that, Everest, they'd be heroes. I'd be just another woman who'd popped out a baby." However, Redford hits true-sounding notes when she contemplates how mountaineering women who had scaled Everest and other big peaks and then had children and retired from the sport were at least alive to tell the tale. Better, and worth the price of admission, are Redford's up-close encounters with the rock itself: "Ropey tendons popped up on the backs of my hands, white with chalk as I clamped down on each hold like a vise. There was no noise in my head, no voices telling me what I could or could not do."Fails to scale the literary heights of Arlene Blum's Annapurna: A Woman's Place (1982) in the canon of women's mountaineering books but still worthy for aspiring climbers

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April 15, 2018
Canadian Redford chronicles her personal history of rock climbing as well as her many romantic entanglements with fellow climbers in this spirited and often surprising memoir. Tough-talking, tobacco-chewing, and occasionally downright dangerous on the rope, Redford has had more than her share of adventures and delights, and she regales readers with the good and the bad as she looks back on her years spent pushing body and heart to the limits. Her refreshing honesty, especially about her mistakes, is a welcome respite from more self-aggrandizing memoirs, and her refusal to shy away from the more turbulent parts of her past, including a tragic loss, balances well her lighthearted reminiscences. In an era when women are still proving themselves worthy of equal pay, Redford has made her mark through sheer willpower and muscle. It's a toss-up whether readers will identify more with her athletic prowess or her sexual escapades, but they will certainly never be bored by this no-holds-barred look at a life spent pushing the limits.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)