Book review
Th e Escapist: How One Man Cheated Death on the World’s Highest Mountains,’ by Gabriel Filippi with Brett Popplewell
Journal Pioneer’s book reviewer, Desiree Anstey, off ers her thoughts on Gabriel Filippi’s “The Escapist: How One Man Cheated Death on the World’s Highest Mountains.”
This gripping memoir follows Gabriel Filippi’s step- by-agonizing- step to the highest summits in the world, while thrilling and terrifying the reader at every turn of the page.
“People ask me about the terrible things I’ve seen at the top of Everest. They ask about the bodies that litter the mountainside, about the friends I’ve lost trying to get to the summit, or about the avalanche that almost took my life. I tell them the truth: that up there, life is precious and sometimes terrifying, and I can’t wait to get back,” writes the author, Filippi, in the opening chapter. The story begins with a young boy desperately trying to please an angry and unpredictable father, haunted by his military past. Th en a young man, still reeling from the collapse of his marriage, learns his father died of cancer just four days after Christmas.
He finds himself looking for an escape from a lonely existence, and discovers his calling in climbing. For 20 years the mountains become his “oxygen” determining his worth.
It could be said that Filippi pushes himself to the edge of death as a subconscious way
of trying to accomplish something greater than what anyone expected of him, especially his father.
This memoir is about one man’s desire to follow his wildest dreams, but it will also make the reader think twice about life, about family, and the simple things we take for granted. Th e title, too, “Th e Escapist,” is befi tting because Filippi repeatedly escapes death. But the cost of survival comes at a price.
Filippi recalls navigating the Death Zone on Mount Everest in the Himalayas, following in the footsteps of his hero Sir Ed- mund Hillary( one of the first to reach the summit in 1953), when he starts feeling the terrible effects of altitude sickness.
He writes, “My blood was turning to sludge; my brain and lungs were slowly swelling as my heart pounded against my chest. I was dying, but I felt inspired.”
To make matters worse, his friend and countryman Frank Ziebarth is resting in the snow at the base of the last true obstacle to the summit. He had managed to summit without oxygen, but on his descent sat down to catch his breath.
Th e atmospheric pressure is so low at this height that all life begins to die.
A year earlier, Ziebarth told Filippi that he planned to stand on the summit with a banner above his head, asking his girlfriend to marry him.
Filippi is making his descent from the summit and finds Ziebarth exactly where he left him, hours later. Ziebarth had slipped into a coma and died as a result of high- altitude cerebral edema.
Th at same girlfriend asked Filippi to remove Ziebarth’s corpse from the well- known path to the summit.
Filippi writes, “Exhausted and with little time and oxygen left, I put my arms around his body and tried to move him. I couldn’t. His body had frozen to the mountainside… When I began looking around his collar, a layer of snow fell to his chest, and suddenly I was staring at the face of the man I once knew.”
Th e frost- covered face of his friend will remain trapped in his mind years later, haunting him, but there is a resolution.
Filippi writes a letter to Ziebarth’s girlfriend to reassure her that his “life and death would have an impact on every climber who passed him from now until eternity. Th at he wouldn’t grow old on the mountain.
He would remain there, exactly as he was.”
There will be many more climbs for Filippi, literally causing the reader holding their breath as we feel every raw emotion – from a Taliban attack on northern Pakistan to the deadliest disaster in Everest’s history.
Readers won’t want to put down this non- fiction that serves as is a poignant reminder that it’s possible to do far more than what anyone might think possible, so long as you don’t give up.
Th e author is the only Quebecer to have climbed both faces of the highest point on earth, Everest. He has scaled six of the highest peaks around the world, before becoming an ambassador for his hometown of Lac- Mégantic. He is a member of the North Face athlete team, Ironman, and a proud grandfather. He lives in Montreal.