Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

Overview

“If you’ve run out of Saint-Exupéry and miss the eloquent power of his work, then you are ready to read David Roberts.” —Laurence Gonzales, author of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why

David Roberts has spent his career documenting voyages to the most extreme landscapes on earth. In Limits of the Known, he reflects on humanity’s—and his own—relationship to exploration and extreme risk. Part memoir and part history, this book tries to make sense of why so many have committed their lives to the desperate pursuit of adventure. What compelled Eric Shipton to return, five times, to the ridges of Mt. Everest, plotting the mountain’s most treacherous territory years before Hillary and Tenzing’s famous ascent? What drove Bill Stone to dive 3,000 feet underground into North America’s deepest cave? And what is the future of adventure in a world we have mapped and trodden from end to end? In the wake of his diagnosis with throat cancer, Roberts seeks answers with new urgency and “penetrating self-analysis” (Booklist).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356595
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2019
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	523,306
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David Roberts (1943–2021) was the author of thirty books on mountaineering, exploration, and anthropology. His books have won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition.

Table of Contents

Prologue xi

1 Farthest North 1

2 Blank On The Map 47

3 Prehistoric 5.10 85

Interlude: The Quest For The Other 121

4 First Descent 133

5 First Contact 171

6 The Undiscovered Earth 207

7 The Future Of Adventure 253

Note on Sources 299

Acknowledgments 303

Editorial Reviews

"Even the familiar tales in this book are gripping.… Uplifting."

Wall Street Journal

"Roberts writes with a journalistic eye, looking at younger versions of himself as though they were people to be understood. In the end, his book is about rediscovering himself, even as he faces a frightening reminder of his own mortality. A unique combination of penetrating self-analysis and armchair travel."

Booklist

11/13/2017
Roberts, an adventurer and author of nearly 30 books (Alone on the Ice, etc.), movingly reflects on his life prior to undergoing throat-cancer treatment that made physical exertion nearly impossible for him. The diagnosis led him to consider the meaning of his own adventures and those of other explorers, such as Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay and British Arctic explorer Henry Worsley. Interspersed with these vivid retellings of other’s adventures are reminiscences about Roberts’s own outdoor pursuits, many of which were life-or-death undertakings. Roberts’s initial revelation while undergoing chemotheraphy was that when he looked at explorers, he saw “little point... in trying to unearth an overarching purpose in our madness,” yet he eventually surmises that his love for adventure was “encoded” in his DNA; he felt an inherent need for the knowledge and companionship that dangerous situations require. Roberts also reflects on life’s bittersweet joys, such as when he looks at a recent photo, taken with his wife on a short hike, that captures “my emaciated feebleness but also the happiness of that day.” Roberts conveys the exhilaration and vitality of adventuring as well as the agony and anger of a cancer diagnosis with equal aplomb, making for a moving narrative that speaks to the glories of the human spirit and the limitations of the human body. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"A beautiful contribution by legendary climber/author David Roberts. ... [C]ompelling and honest."

Climbing

"If you've run out of Saint-Exupéry and miss the eloquent power of his work, then you are ready to read David Roberts."

Laurence Gonzales

"A beautiful treatise on the extremes humans will go to in order better to understand ourselves and the world we live in for such a brief time."

Shelf Awareness

2017-11-12
Veteran mountaineer and historian Roberts (The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest, 2015, etc.) looks once more at the question of why humans are so bent on scaling the world's tall places.Climbers have worried that the planet's peaks are getting overcrowded ever since Petrarch ascended Mont Ventoux, and indeed readers could be forgiven for thinking that Roberts was among the last to live in the golden age of adventure and exploration. Take, for example, his first contact with a people hidden away in the depths of an island rainforest: "I had never been part of such a strange cultural interchange, and I covertly stared back, wondering, What are they thinking? Who do they think we are? Why do they think we've come?" Good questions all. In the main, this is an amiable if surely adventure-packed collection of yarns and historical oddments; who knew that one of the first organized mountaineering expeditions in the world involved a theologian, a carpenter, and the "official ladderman to the king"? Roberts is as home in libraries as he is on summits, and he explores the literature of mountaineering and some of its genre conventions, if not clichés: the use, for example, of "martial metaphors on every page supported a narrative that veered closer to melodrama than to understatement." So it is with the books that mark a true golden age, that of Himalayan mountaineering, which Roberts closes off at 1964, books that center on a pair of daring climbers while scarcely acknowledging the vast support staff behind them. The author is more generous in writing of the great teams that figure in any expedition, and, he notes, expeditions are continuing, now with young climbers who appreciate their predecessors: "I no longer worry that the skills and technology of the current band of alpinists relegate the deeds of my own generation to the limbo of ‘pretty good for its time,' " he writes.Roberts ponders his mortality while celebrating the freedom of wild places. A book for anyone who appreciates good adventure writing.

Kirkus Reviews