Over the Edge, by Greg Childs

Climbers are, of course, risk-takers by definition. But they don’t have a death-wish. On the contrary, they have a life-wish. It’s a complicated thing, but basically it comes down to this: Living close to the edge has a way of sharpening your senses, of making you feel more alive. Coming out of a decade’s worth of mountaineering literature that produced some real peaks (John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air) and valleys (Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb), this may be the first popular entertainment since The Eiger Sanction to combine the thrills of high-peak technical alpinism with the spills of international intrigue. It’s the true story of four of America’s most gifted climbers who were camped high on the walls of Mount Zhioltaya Stena. They were within spitting distance of Afghanistan when their expedition was hijacked by Islamic extremists. Marched at gunpoint to within an inch of their lives, they escaped by doing the one thing a climber would never wish on his worst enemy: They pushed their captor… well, you already know the title. Childs has written a striking book that ups the ante on your typical mountaineering apology. It’s one thing to put yourself in that kind of danger. It’s quite another to push someone else into it. Childs reads at Ruminator Books in St. Paul, May 2, (651) 699-0587. Accompany-ing the author will be John Dickey, one of the climbers.