New Year's Resolution Book Club

As a participant in Brain Chase Book Club, you’ll read the same book as many other people and have the opportunity to comment on it in our forum. It’s our only elective that actually lets you interact with other participants.

Reading selection for The Gold Rush, January 2017 New Year’s Resolution Challenge: Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival, by Joe Simpson.

Summary: Joe Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, had just reached the top of a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes when disaster struck. Simpson plunged off the vertical face of an ice ledge, breaking his leg. In the hours that followed, darkness fell and a blizzard raged as Yates tried to lower his friend to safety. Finally, Yates was forced to cut the rope, moments before he would have been pulled to his own death.

The next three days were an impossibly grueling ordeal for both men. Yates, certain that Simpson was dead, returned to base camp consumed with grief and guilt over abandoning him. Miraculously, Simpson had survived the fall, but crippled, starving, and severely frostbitten was trapped in a deep crevasse. Summoning vast reserves of physical and spiritual strength, Simpson crawled over the cliffs and canyons of the Andes, reaching base camp hours before Yates had planned to leave.

How both men overcame the torments of those harrowing days is an epic tale of fear, suffering, and survival, and a poignant testament to unshakable courage and friendship.

To learn about all of the electives for the Grown-up New Year’s Resolution Challenge, click here.