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Title: Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild by Chip Brown ISBN: 1-57322-236-4 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 31 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Deadly Silence?
Comment: Chip Brown's biography of Guy Waterman is a depressing read. It is also a fascinating, well written biography. Overall, I agree with the review posted here by Lawrence Hauser, which is excellent. In particular, I concur with Hauser's praise of the chapter on Waterman's son John.
What most captivated me about Guy Waterman's story was his refusal to seek help, his belief that somehow his life was uniquely different. He seemed to live with all kinds of denial, including his alcoholism, even though he did manage to stop drinking. His ultimate denial had to do with his reason's for killing himself -- the argument that impending old age would be unbearable. 67 and in perfectly good health? Of course, the only health Waterman had was physical. His deep depression and inability to communicate emotionally with his wife suggest a gravely ill man. But Waterman, an otherwise very intelligent person, refused to seek help. As Brown tells it, Waterman's life was truly tragic.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Motivational Status Of A Suicide
Comment: Chip Brown is an exceptionally gifted writer. His prose is fluid, inventive, full of literary allusion and smart. In Good Morning Midnight he has turned his attention to the planned suicide of Guy Waterman, a famous mountaineer and outdoorsman, who froze himself to death one desperately frigid night in February 2000 atop a mountain in the New Hampshire wilderness. Although the book is biographical in the sense that it explores Waterman's life in toto, the central preoccupation is most definitely the motivational matrix of the choice to die made by a sixty-seven year-old man who was in relatively good health for his age and who enjoyed a rich life well worth continuing with in the eyes of those who knew and loved him. Why does a person make the choice of death? Is it a legitimate choice? What life circumstances eventuate in such a choice? How does the choice affect surviving family and friends? These are the questions Brown relentlessly wrestles with throughout his study. Along with the question of whether medical/psychiatric intervention would have made a difference in the final outcome. As a biography of a unique, multi-talented man Good Morning Midnight held my interest until the last page. I particularly liked Brown's attention to Waterman's two eldest sons who died (killed themselves?) in the Alaskan wilderness both before they were thirty years of age. The chapter devoted to middle son John Waterman, a famous climber in his own right, was absolutely riveting and marked the high point of the book in this reader's opinion. Brown posits that for Guy Waterman it was the loss of two of his three boys, and the remorse he felt about his role in their untimely demise, that ultimately drove him to consider his life not worth living. But there is so much speculation and hand wringing about motivation that after a while it became a chore to follow along with this layer of the text. I especially found Brown's concern with whether or not Waterman was clinically depressed and in need of treatment tiresome. Just because it is possible to 'treat' does not mean that we all must choose to be cured. Not everyone desires the intrusion of medical attention under all circumstances just because it is available. And not every bit of every individual's life need necessarily be understood down to every minute fragment of the psyche's intricate web of meaning and motivation. As Waterman's wife Laura wrote after the death of her husband, "Why rend the veil?" Amen! The idea that we must all live to the very last possible moment of our lives regardless of the quality of those lives is an overbearing injunction that has led to many of the problems of modern society, not the least of which is the all too pervasive, frequently gruesome hospitalization of death. Waterman led a full life and his death was thematically consonant with the overarching trajectory of that life. Although he made mistakes that came to haunt him in his later years, his choice to die at the moment he was ready to go seems a courageous act that might well be respected on its own terms rather than dissected ad nauseum by those without the fortitude to recognize that we are each and every one of us heading for the same destination and that it is the act of taking responsibility for our final station in life that quintessentially defines who we are and what we are in fact really made of. Whatever his shortcomings, Guy Waterman was made of the stuff of legend. May he rest in peace.
Rating: 5
Summary: A well-penned epilogue
Comment: This very artfully told tale was truly page turner for me. Thick with literary references, Brown's story of Guy Waterman reflects the complexity of a multi-talented individual, appreciated by many, but omniouly least of all by himself.
I came away with a very strong feeling that Guy Waterman was truly a unique individual. His successes far outweighed his failures. But his ultimate failure was to recognize that hardmen mature into wisemen. Old Men of the Mountain types, who regale their friends and cohorts with lessons and values of challenging and living amongst the mountains. No matter how far flung the challenge, a mountaineer's ultimate objective is to return from his/her adventure to share the experience; the cold, the hard breathing, the colors, the wind and their intimate feelings of wonder or survival. Regretfully, Guy's inner-self, his demons, contested his own outwardly generous, steadfast and friendly personality.
For me, Brown's story reacquainted me with several names and places familiar in mountaineering circles. It also cleard my long held confusion between John Waterman the highly acclaimed, albeit daring alpinist, Guy's son and Jonathan Waterman the prolific author of Alaskan mountaineering.
HOWEVER, as an end note the publisher editorial and Author INCORRECTLY stated that Krakauer wrote about John Waterman. The book Into the Wild was the story of Chris McCandless, by J.Krakauer.
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Title: A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True by Laura Waterman, Guy Waterman ISBN: 0898867347 Publisher: Mountaineers Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert by Jason Kersten ISBN: 0060184701 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Pub. Date: 29 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure by Maria Coffey, Tom Hornbein ISBN: 0312290659 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Afterwards, You're a Genius: Faith, Medicine, and the Metaphysics of Healing by Chip Brown ISBN: 1573227765 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Fragile Edge: A Personal Portrait of Loss on Everest by Maria Coffey, Chris Bonington ISBN: 0898867371 Publisher: Mountaineers Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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