Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents — and keeps turning back to his own record and to the friends who died. There’s a hard passage about a partner killed on an early climb that he had written around for decades. He doesn’t arrive at a consoling answer, and the honesty about what the obsession took from him and from others is the reason to read it.
Limits of the Known