At age sixteen, Andy Cave followed in his father's
and his grandfather's footsteps and became a miner - one
of the last recruits into a dying world. Every day he
would descend 3,500 feet into the Grimethorpe pit - and
for [pound]25, spend up to seven hours in thigh deep
water, in the pitch black digging for coal. But at
weekends Andy inhabited a very different world -
thousands of feet above the pitheads of the colliery.
Introduced to his local mountaineering club while a
miner, he soon learned to cherish this new-found
freedom, high above the slag heaps of his home town.
Living through the strikes of the mid-eighties - the
guilt, the broken friendships, the poverty - Andy
continued to indulge his passion, and in 1986, after
much soul-searching, he quit his job as a miner in order
to take up mountaineering professionally. In the
Himalaya in 1997 Andy achieved one of the hardest climbs
ever recorded on one of the steepest and most difficult
summits of the world - the north face of Changabang.
Seventeen days later, he and two of his teammates - his
best friend had already perished in an avalanche -
crawled into basecamp, frostbitten and emaciated.His
account of this terrifying experience provides a
dramatic climax to this extraordinary story. Learning to
Breathe is, first and foremost, a lively and humorous
memoir, written with energy and insight, about two very
different groups of men, each navigating equally
inhospitable worlds. Finally, on a larger scale, it is
an examination of our ability to draw on inner strengths
and the strengths of others. |
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