Cameraman and Everest adventurer David Breashears is a man of dogged determination and discipline. Even as a child, his sense of adventure led him to scaling rocky cliffs and mountains. As a young man, his love for ice climbing and his experiences with filming has led to such career experiences as the filming of Sylvester Stallone’s movie Cliffhanger, the large format IMAX movie Everest, and a documentary film on Everest’s summit the PBS series Nova.

Unlike the breath-taking heart-stopping action of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Breashears takes his readers into his own psyche--that of a man driven by a sense of challenge, but with knowledge and discipline. One can only marvel at Breashears’ accomplishments in the fields of climbing and film-making. His many colleagues that shared his lifetime of adventure also merit a sense of awe. There was one piece of Breashears life story that left me a bit uncomfortable, though. Was the beautiful Veronique truly that unimportant to his life to deserve the a passing mention?