Between a Rock and a Hard Place

From Publishers Weekly
Ralston's story is one of the most gut-wrenching and compelling real-life adventures in recent years: in early 2003, the avid rock-climber and outdoorsman became trapped in a Utah mountain canyon when an 800-pound boulder pinned his right arm. He spent six days there, fighting both the physical challenges of pain and dehydration, and the psychological horror that eroded his hope and energy. Eventually, he amputated his own arm with his pocket knife in order to gain his freedom. It's a truly remarkable story, and hearing Ralston retell it is alternately fascinating and unbearable. After a brief setup that details his life as an adventurer, he arrives at his moment of horror, walking the listener in painstaking detail through everything he felt and thought; his honest and blunt language (" 'What are you doing, Aron? Get that knife away from your wrist!' I feel vaguely ill... my vision blurs in a nauseating swirl"), paired with his direct and non-sensational delivery, wrap the listener in a mental blanket of claustrophobia. Although squeamish listeners might find this audio presentation too overwhelming, it's a riveting document of one man's extraordinary trial. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School - From midday Saturday, April 26, 2003, until midday Thursday, May 1, Ralston was pinned between a boulder and a canyon wall in a remote area of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. He had little food and water. No one would even wonder where he was until he didn't show up for work on Tuesday. Unable to sit, lie down, use his right arm (that was the part between the rock and the wall), or sleep, he knew right away that he was in for an excruciatingly difficult time. Those 120 hours of what he calls "uninterrupted experience" tested to the fullest his physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual being. His eventual rescue led to international headlines, partially due to his dramatic means of escape: he severed his arm with a cheap, dull, dirty knife. This is a searing and amazingly detailed rendition of his ordeal, along with accounts of several of Ralston's previous wilderness adventures. He is one active and tough guy, but readers never get the sense that he is boastful or seeking notoriety. Rather, he seems genuinely intrigued, even mildly befuddled, by his insatiable drive to be active in the wild. One could say he takes too many risks, and that he has a tendency toward carelessness. He himself notes this. But the man's drive and devotion to his calling are nothing but admirable. Sixteen pages of color photographs add considerably to readers' experience of this nuanced, gripping survival story that belongs in most collections. - Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Could you cut off your own arm if it were the only way to save yourself? Aron Ralston made headlines by doing just that. This account of how he was trapped in an isolated Utah canyon for six days, and how he methodically went about extricating himself, is more than just another tale about those who head into the wilderness seeking their bliss and get lost. A former Intel engineer, Ralston identifies with Chris McCandless, the introspective seeker of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which raised true adventure to a new level -- and to the bestseller charts. But McCandless was a loner and hobo who abandoned his possessions, burned his money and died of starvation in Alaska while acting out what Krakauer believed was a complicated rebellion against his father. By contrast, Ralston initially comes across as a cocky adrenaline junkie, loving son and punctual employee who nevertheless courts danger. Born in 1975, Ralston was scared of snow when his parents first moved from Indiana to Colorado. But he adapted spectacularly. While still in his teens he was skiing, climbing, rafting and planning to climb in winter all 59 of Colorado's Fourteeners -- peaks over 14,000 feet high. He graduated from college with a double major in mechanical engineering and French, as well as a minor in piano performance, although strangely he says nothing of his musical ability or the accident's effect on it. His resumé was filled with close encounters. A bear stalked him in Grand Teton National Park. He nearly drowned in the Grand Canyon. He was trapped high on a mountain in a snowstorm. While he was back-country skiing, his "cavalier attitude" led him to choose a route that triggered an avalanche. It nearly buried him and two friends -- both of whom, he admits, have refused to talk to him since."Rather than regret those choices," he writes, "I swore to myself that I would learn from their consequences. Most simply, I came to understand that my attitudes were not intrinsically safe." As we know now, he didn't learn. It is as exasperating to read his confessions of hotdogging and recklessness as it is inspiring to see how logical he was once he got stuck. His fateful weekend begins with climbing a major peak in Colorado, then speeding off in his jeep to mountain bike to a remote trailhead for what he expects will be a fun day of slithering through sandstone labyrinths, his headphones blaring Phish music. He takes almost no food and very little water. Nor does he tell anyone where he is headed. Then he accidentally jiggles loose an enormous rock that wedges his arm against a canyon wall. Realizing quickly that he might be facing death, he videotapes heartfelt goodbyes, including instructions on how to locate his IRA portfolio. Warding off morbid thoughts, he launches ingenious self-rescue maneuvers. He tries chipping away pieces of the boulder. When that doesn't work, he rigs a pulley system in a futile effort to move it. As he describes, in excruciating detail, hour upon harrowing hour of dehydration and then delirium, we learn that he actually tried sawing off his limb early on, but failed. The moment that he figures out he must break the bones in his arm first so he can cut through soft tissue sounds horrible, yet Ralston feels triumphant. If Aron Ralston had been just an accident waiting to happen, why should we care about him? First, because there are thousands of potential victims like him. Colorado officials estimate that a half-million people climbed at least one Fourteener last year. Adrenaline fever is contagious; on occasion it is deadly. Heedless wilderness tourists routinely wander off without so much as a water bottle. And anyone who has hiked solo has probably taken a wrong turn or a scary fall. Has it ever dawned on us what the consequences might be should we break a leg or get caught in a flash flood? We also care because Ralston writes very well. His thoughts ricochet from anger to anguish to acceptance. He recounts the joy of risk, and he takes full responsibility: "The boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. . . . You did this, Aron. . . . You chose . . . to do this descent into the slot canyon by yourself. . . . You created this accident. . . . You have been heading for this situation for a long time." His recital even takes on a weird humor as he notes that his self-amputation is more successful than his botched dissection of a sheep's eyeball in a ninth-grade science class. Once he frees himself, the story accelerates into a riveting drama as he rappels one-handed down a cliff and staggers through rough terrain for miles, blood leaking through his tourniquet as he tries to find help. Aron Ralston went to Utah as just another rock jock; he emerges as a Gen X action hero. Reviewed by Grace Lichtenstein Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The world knows the outlines of Ralston's extraordinary story: with precious little water or food, his right arm pinned for nearly five days by a boulder in a narrow canyon shaft in central-eastern Utah, Ralston amputated the arm with his pocketknife, then rappelled and hiked his way to his own rescue. What makes his account of his ordeal extraordinary, too, is the detail and precision Ralston, a former mechanical engineer, brings to the telling, from the almost minute-by-minute chronology of his ordeal to topographical descriptions of the ground he's covered in his life as an outdoor adventurer. It's also the extremes of failure and achievement we see forged in this life-or-death crisis: carelessness at not telling friends where he was going, despair as he wrote his epitaph on the canyon wall, even a certain unthinking in taking five days to figure out his deliverance. But those were all trumped by Ralston's amazing resourcefulness in prolonging his supplies and finding a way out, his boundless enthusiasm for life, and his dogged force of will at enduring far longer than anyone could have expected. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Adult/High School-From midday Saturday, April 26, 2003, until midday Thursday, May 1, Ralston was pinned between a boulder and a canyon wall in a remote area of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. He had little food and water. No one would even wonder where he was until he didn't show up for work on Tuesday. Unable to sit, lie down, use his right arm (that was the part between the rock and the wall), or sleep, he knew right away that he was in for an excruciatingly difficult time. Those 120 hours of what he calls "uninterrupted experience" tested to the fullest his physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual being. His eventual rescue led to international headlines, partially due to his dramatic means of escape: he severed his arm with a cheap, dull, dirty knife. This is a searing and amazingly detailed rendition of his ordeal, along with accounts of several of Ralston's previous wilderness adventures. He is one active and tough guy, but readers never get the sense that he is boastful or seeking notoriety. Rather, he seems genuinely intrigued, even mildly befuddled, by his insatiable drive to be active in the wild. One could say he takes too many risks, and that he has a tendency toward carelessness. He himself notes this. But the man's drive and devotion to his calling are nothing but admirable. Sixteen pages of color photographs add considerably to readers' experience of this nuanced, gripping survival story that belongs in most collections.-Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.


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