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the complete review - non-fiction

Mountains of the Mind

by
Robert Macfarlane

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : solid, entertaining book about mountains and mountain-climbing

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Generally quite impressed

  From the Reviews:

• "(A) beguiling mix of memoir and cultural essay. While a history of mountain aesthetics is not such a novel idea as Granta would have us believe (...) Macfarlane puts an audacious new route up the familiar rock-face. Not many would attempt a move from George Mallory to Roland Barthes without falling flat on their faces, but he manages it with some style." - Hugh Thomson, The Independent
  
  
• "(I)lluminating and, occasionally, vertiginous (.....) This book glitters with memorable phrases." - Christopher Hirst, The Independent
  
  
• "Mountains of the Mind is a tumult of delights all the way. I found it particularly rewarding on early puzzling about the origin of mountains." - Roy Herbert, New Scientist
  
  
• "Mountains of the Mind goes back three centuries, showing how a few brainy opinion makers created the outdoor image. (...) This book is mostly dispassionate, but ends with a broadside against mountain macho." - John Rothchild, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The transformation of mountain landscapes in the European imagination was an astonishing reversal and that process has rarely been explored so effectively as Robert Macfarlane does in Mountains of the Mind. (...) Macfarlane argues that romanticism continues to dictate our responses to mountain landscapes." - Ed Douglas, The Observer
  
  
• "Macfarlane, who continues his family's tradition of climbing, has assembled a convincing book of historical evidence alongside his own oxygen-deprived experiences in an attempt to answer the age-old question, "Why climb the mountain ?"" - Stephen Lyons, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Much the most effective parts of the book are his own stories: narrowly surviving a fall of rocks in the Alps; a night huddled in a snow-cave on the Cairngorms. Sometimes his prose approaches a Shelleyan ecstasy. (...) It's easy to discern in Mountains of the Mind the outlines of a superb book, but it doesn't live up to that promise." - Robert Hanks, The Telegraph
  
  
• "What Macfarlane gives us instead is an extremely elegant and compelling context for this most deadly of amusements. One strand is geographical -- how mountains and glaciers were made. The other is spiritual -- how they were once viewed as the most forbidding features of a threatening world, then as wonders invested by God with an awful, sublime beauty, and finally as challenges to be tackled and tamed." - Tom Fort, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Macfarlane's "history of the imagination" is resolutely Eurocentric, and little space is granted to the non-Western mind (.....) Mountains of the Mind is, broadly, a cultural history interleaved with autobiographical vignettes (the author's agent told him to "put an 'I' into it"). The latter are nicely handled." - Ian Pindar, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Robert Macfarlane is passionate about mountain-climbing, and appropriately enough begins his book on the subject describing how in childhood he became "sold on adventure". It is books that first truly enraptured him, his grandfather's collection of adventurers' tales of Everest and elsewhere ideal fodder and feast for a child's imagination. But Macfarlane convincingly suggests that much of the spell of mountaineering is this very thing, carried over into adulthood, and that is what he means to convey in this book:

For that reason it doesn't deal in names, dates, peaks and heights, like the standard histories of the mountains, but instead in sensations, emotions and ideas. It isn't really a history of mountaineering at all, in fact, but a history of the imagination.

Oil painting is an appropriate medium to represent the processes of geology, for oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals.

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Links:

• Vinatge publicity page
• Granta publicity page
• Excerpt
• Interview in The Guardian
• Interview at Bookslut
• Guardian First Book Award, 2003
• Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, 2004

• hiking-site.nl (Dutch)
• The Independent
• The Independent (scroll down for review)
• New Scientist
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Scottish Mountaineer (scroll down for review)
• The Telegraph
• The Telegraph

• John P. O'Grady on Grave Goods
• See Index of Travel-related books
• See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

       British writer Robert Macfarlane was born in 1976.

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© 2005-2009 the complete review

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