Counterpoint

Arlene Blum led the first American women's expedition to Annapurna in 1978. Two members summited; two others died attempting a second route. Blum's account is both a mountaineering narrative and a document of what it cost women to earn their place in the high mountains.

The story opens with a furious 14-year-old Jan Redford scrambling high up a chossy rock face, angry at her dad for keeping her out of the “men’s work” involved in moving the family to a rural cabin outside of Québec. The experience was both terrifying and liberating, and from that night onward her complicated love affair with mountains shaped her life, through losing her boyfriend in an avalanche, and later a marriage that restrained and suffocated her. This is a coming-of-age memoir of a climber finding her way in the alpine and also of a woman and mother carving out her sense of identity in a masculine world. When do we set turnaround times in our everyday lives, and how do we sustain a healthy kinship with anger and fear? Redford often writes that she’s “chickenshit,” yet this book is anything but: Its moods gracefully swing from gritty humor to soul-searching agony to the unfettered, sweet freedom of climbing.

A geologist's reckoning with the American landscape through the lens of race — how the land was taken, who was erased, and what the rocks remember. Savoy brings scientific training and personal history to terrain that most nature writing ignores.