David Stevenson’s New Book is ‘Warnings Against Myself’
David Stevenson’s new book Warnings Against Myself, Meditations on a Life in Climbing will hit shelves in May 2016.
The media release states, “With personal essays detailing noteworthy climbing sites throughout the western United States, infused with a few terrifying excursions to the Alps and a trip to the Bugaboos of western Canada, Warnings Against Myself opens up the beautiful, obsessive world of mountain climbing to climbers and non climbers alike.”
From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon’s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent excursion across the Harding Icefield in the Kenai Mountains of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska conceived under the influence of rain and whiskey, David Stevenson chronicles several decades of a life unified by a preoccupation with climbing.
Stevenson describes climbing first hand, but also reflects on climbing in a beautiful way that draws in both literary references and engaging characterizations of well-known climbers.
His changing viewpoint on his dangerous obsession as he ages, marries, and has children (and then takes his son climbing) give the book a strong shape, and the work as a whole adds a new and thoughtful perspective to the literature of climbing.